Ailin Lepletier
Dr Lepletier is a Research Fellow at the Institute for Glycomics, Griffith University (Gold Coast, AUS) with over 10 years of experience in the immunology field. In her current role, she investigates adaptive immune responses following SARS-CoV-2 and group A streptococcal infection and vaccination in humans and mice. She is also one of the lead researchers to characterize and validate a novel marker in regulatory T cells that impacts physiological immunity and the pathogenesis of ulcerative colitis.
Dr Lepletier completed her PhD in 2015 investigating strategies to increase immunosurveillance in aging. She was granted an international scholarship that allowed her to develop her thesis as a collaborative research project between Monash University (Melbourne, AUS) and FIOCRUZ (Rio de Janeiro, Bazil).
As a postdoctoral researcher, between 2015-2020 Dr Lepletier worked in the cancer immunotherapy field at QIMR Berghofer. She has pioneered the development of tissue cytometry imaging and immunological assays showing for the first time, the distribution of CD155 and its cognate receptors, CD96, TIGIT and CD226, within the human cancer microenvironment and their impact on melanoma patients’ response to immunotherapy. Her research led to the development of a human antibody directed against the immune checkpoint receptor, CD96. In this role, she worked on projects in close collaboration with Bristol-Myers Squibb (BMS, New York) and clinicians conducting major clinical trials to treat cancer patients with immune checkpoint blockade therapy. This gave her a strong understanding of academic-industry partnerships.
Dr Lepletier is a regular reviewer of manuscripts for various journals and has published over 20 peer-reviewed papers, including 10 first-author and multiple high-impact co-author publications in Immunity, Cancer Discovery, Journal of Clinical Investigation and Clinical Cancer Research.
Abstracts this author is presenting: