Alessandro Sette, Dr.Biol.Sci.

Professor

Center for Autoimmunity and Inflammation - Director, Center for Cancer Immunotherapy, Center for Vaccine Innovation

"New infectious agents originate all the time dating back to the plague in the siege of Athens in the 7th century to the endemic flu in 1918 that killed 20 million people. For medical science, it’s a perennial race between new infectious diseases coming up and society reacting to them, understanding them and ultimately defeating them."

Overview

Dr. Alessandro Sette has devoted more than 35 years of study towards understanding the immune response, measuring immune activity, and developing disease intervention strategies against cancer, autoimmunity, allergy, and infectious diseases. The laboratory is defining in chemical terms the specific structures (epitopes) that the immune system recognizes, and uses this knowledge to measure and understand immune responses.

The Sette lab’s approach uses epitopes as specific probes to define the immune signatures associated with productive/protective immunity versus deficient immunity/immunopathology. This research will improve understanding of how the body successfully battles infection, and conversely, how pathogens escape the immune system, causing the individual to succumb to disease. Because of the laboratory’s success in its study of immune response, Sette and his team believe their research will lead to development of new therapeutic and prophylactic approaches to fighting infectious diseases. In this area, Dr. Sette’s disease focus has shifted over the years from HIV, HBV and HCV to emerging diseases and diseases of potential biodefense concern to, most recently, diseases and pathogens relevant to worldwide global health, including SARS-CoV-2, Dengue, Zika, Chikungunya, malaria, M. tuberculosis, B. pertussis, and shingles. Furthermore, Dr. Sette’s team has adapted the methods and techniques developed in the context of infectious disease to understand the T cell response to common allergens and to discover a cell component in Parkinson’s Disease.

Finally, Dr. Sette has overseen the design and curation efforts of the national Immune Epitope Database (IEDB), a freely available, widely used bioinformatics resource, since its inception in the early 2000s. The IEDB catalogs all epitopes for humans, non-human primates, rodents, and other vertebrates, from allergens, infectious diseases, autoantigens and transplants, and includes epitope prediction tools to accelerate immunology research around the world.

Additional Publications

Featured publications

Feb 5, 2021 Science.

Immunological memory to SARS-CoV-2 assessed for up to 8 months after infection.

Dan JM, Mateus J, Kato Y, Hastie KM, Yu ED, Faliti CE, Grifoni A, Ramirez SI, Haupt S, Frazier A, Nakao C, Rayaprolu V, Rawlings SA, Peters B, Krammer F, Simon V, Saphire EO, Smith DM, Weiskopf D, Sette A, Crotty S.

May 20, 2020 Cell

Targets of T cell responses to SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus in humans with COVID-19 disease and unexposed individuals

Grifoni, A., Weiskopf, D., Ramirez, S.I., Mateus, J., Dan, J.M., Moderbacher, C.R., Rawlings, S.A., Sutherland, A., Premkumar, L., Jadi, R.S., Marrama, D., de Silva, A.M., Frazier, A., Carlin, A., Greenbaum, J.A., Peters, B., Krammer, F., Smith, D.M., Crotty, S., Sette, A.,

Aug 4, 2020 Science

Selective and cross-reactive SARS-CoV-2 T cell epitopes in unexposed humans

Mateus J, Grifoni A, Tarke A, Sidney J, Ramirez SI, Dan JM, Burger ZC, Rawlings SA, Smith DM, Phillips E, Mallal S, Lammers M, Rubiro P, Quiambao L, Sutherland A, Yu ED, da Silva Antunes R, Greenbaum J, Frazier A, Markmann AJ, Premkumar L, de Silva A, Peters B, Crotty S, Sette A, Weiskopf D.

Dec 3, 2021 Science.

mRNA vaccines induce durable immune memory to SARS-CoV-2 and variants of concern.

Goel RR, Painter MM, Apostolidis SA, Mathew D, Meng W, Rosenfeld AM, Lundgreen KA, Reynaldi A, Khoury DS, Pattekar A, Gouma S, Kuri-Cervantes L, Hicks P, Dysinger S, Hicks A, Sharma H, Herring S, Korte S, Baxter AE, Oldridge DA, Giles JR, Weirick ME, McAllister CM, Awofolaju M, Tanenbaum N, Drapeau EM, Dougherty J, Long S, D'Andrea K, Hamilton JT, McLaughlin M, Williams JC, Adamski S, Kuthuru O, UPenn COVID Processing Unit, Frank I, Betts MR, Vella LA, Grifoni A, Weiskopf D, Sette A, Hensley SE, Davenport MP, Bates P, Prak ETL, Greenplate AR, Wherry EJ.

Jul 7, 2020 Nat Rev Immunol