FCE Director
Center for Advanced Immuno-monitoring and Translational Immunology
About Mariana Maccioni, PhD
Career path
How did you first get involved in immunology?
It’s a pleasure to be here. I started with immunology because I studied clinical biochemistry at the National University of Cordoba. Cordoba is a large city at the center of Argentina. It is very well known because of its university. It’s one of the oldest universities in South America. And in the nineties, we were all very excited about immunology. We all wanted to cure cancer and cure HIV. I took one of the fundamental immunology classes, and I had a great teacher, Dr. Clelia M Riera, who was really a pioneer woman in science. She really encouraged us to do what we wanted and to study science. She was a great teacher, a great mentor, and as a pre-graduate student, I really enjoyed immunology. At the same moment in our school, the curricula were changing and the authorities started to make a new orientation in immunology. There were new classes and courses in advanced immunology, clinical immunology, and so on. I took them all and I was very enthusiastic. It was a new field, and it was very, very challenging.
Tell us about the research you’re most proud of.
I’m not sure if I can talk about one specific project that I am prouder of than others. When I started my research as a PhD student, I started working in autoimmune prostatitis in an experimental model of autoimmune prostatitis. I didn’t like that model. It was in rats. Everybody was moving into mice, and I was still in this old model, but I could identify the major auto antigen in that model, a protein called prostatein. I am proud now when I look back to this because this discovery set out a basis for describing autoimmune components in inflammatory prostatitis in humans, something that was unknown at that moment, and a new line of research started in my institute regarding inflammatory diseases in the prostate gland in human beings.
I contributed to this new research line that was quite successful. More recently, I am very proud of what we did during the pandemic. Just like in any other place in the world, we were facing a lot of challenges. We needed to provide scientific answers to the very particular public health situation that we had in Argentina. We were running short of vaccines, so the National Ministry of Health initiated a clinical trial to assess if the combination of vaccine platforms (a first dose different from the second dose) were non-inferior (in terms of immunogenicity) than the homologous vaccine regimes that were being used worldwide. We became involved in this clinical trial. We generated a large biobank of peripheral blood mononuclear cells, and we had more than 500 volunteers. We could get longitudinal samples, so we had more than 1500 samples, and we could, with international collaborations, evaluate the cellular immunity elicited by 16 different combinations of vaccines. I think that was very important, and it helped our authorities to make sanitary decisions based on scientific answers. I’m very proud of that too.
What advice would you give to young researchers just starting out in the field?
I would like to tell them to never give up. Research, especially in some low- and middle-income countries, could be full of frustrations and sometimes disappointing. But you have to hold onto your colleagues and build up teams and detect the special talents of your colleagues around you so that you can work and make multidisciplinary or multi-talented teams. This is helpful. Science is a very enriching environment. Usually, you have a social side that is not always known, but you get to know people from all around the world with different cultures and different points of view. This is something that is really enriching.
Work with FOCIS and FCE's
Switching gears, how did you first get involved with FOCIS?
I did my PhD thesis, mostly in experimental models. Later on, I did my postdoc also in murine models. And I wanted to start getting closer to human immunology and translational immunology. I started to get engaged with great scientists like Dr. Oliver Boyer, Dr. Ignacio Anegon, Dr Eliane Piaggio. They were translational immunologists working with patients and doctors in clinical settings and starting to get more and more involved in this type of research. They motivated me to get closer to FOCIS activities, and that’s how I became involved.
How do you think FOCIS has changed your world?
I’m relatively new since our center was nominated as a Center of Excellence a few months ago. But so far FOCIS has motivated me to explore new issues, and especially it has encouraged me to engage and interact more with patients and doctors. I am always looking at what’s new on the FOCIS webpage and the meetings and courses and try to spread the voice of FOCIS around me.
If your colleague asked you why they should join FOCIS, what would you tell them?
For my colleagues in Argentina and South America, I think that FOCIS represents a lot of opportunities to interact with great immunologists from around the world and it also provides a lot of online educational activities and extremely interesting educational opportunities for younger researchers. They have a very interesting scholarship system that facilitates access for investigators in middle-income countries. I encourage a lot of people from Argentina and South America to get involved in FOCIS activities.
We’re going to talk a little bit now about your FCE. Can you tell us about the research that you’re doing?
Our Center of Excellence is composed of clinical investigators, basic investigators, basic immunologists, medical doctors, and clinical biochemists from two big health centers here: the Córdoba Private University Hospital and the New Provincial Maternity “Brigadier Gral. Juan Bautista Bustos”. What we are currently doing is research that will be very interesting, and it appeared after our experience after COVID. Recently, in Argentina we were dealing with a dengue epidemic. We didn’t have dengue in Cordoba, which is in the center of Argentina. Last summer we started having a terrible epidemic of dengue so what we are doing is trying to reproduce the same assays or clinical assays that we did with COVID.
We are trying to generate a biobank of people who are getting vaccinated against dengue. We are collecting blood samples, PBMC and sera, to try to understand the cellular immune response against the dengue vaccine. Since we still have a great population that has not had dengue and has not been vaccinated, we are collecting the pre-immunization samples. Our clinical assay is designed so that we can get samples in a longitudinal manner. We will try to correlate the immune response against dengue vaccine, especially cellular response, which is not very well known, for this vaccine.
Do you have any idea where the epidemic started or how it started?
Climate change has changed the frontiers of dengue. Usually, it occurred only in the northern part of Argentina, which is closer to Brazil. Only the most subtropical and tropical areas had this type of viral disease. But now the frontiers have come down to the center of Argentina, and last summer was really bad. We were not prepared enough. A lot of people got very sick. Now we are getting prepared for the next peak, and we are expecting that the peak will be in February. The campaign of vaccinations started right now because the Takeda vaccine has recently been approved in the country. This vaccine is a tetravalent attenuated virus vaccine that has four serotypes of dengue, is given in two doses, one now and the next one in three months, in December. We are really getting prepared for this new peak that we are expecting.
What do you have as a vision or a dream goal for your FCE?
Our FCE is made up of doctors and scientists who have been collaborating for several years on different research projects and educational initiatives. But I would like us, through the joint efforts of the members of our FCE, to secure the funding necessary for our immune monitoring platform to grow, because now the equipment is scattered across different buildings, even though the buildings are just a few blocks away. If this FCE starts growing, I would like to see our immune monitoring center equipped with all the cutting-edge technology – high dimensional flow cytometry platforms, genomic platforms, etc., all in the same place. This is what we did with the COVID-19 vaccine assay, we performed high dimensional immunophenotyping of the cellular response and this is what we are planning to do with this new project in dengue. But we have to move around different centers to do the flow etc. This is kind of complicated.
What are your biggest challenges?
We are in a very particular moment in Argentina where scientific policies have fallen to their lowest levels in the last 50 years. The biggest challenge is to create projects that are attractive enough to prevent young researchers from emigrating to other countries in search of better job opportunities. This is our major challenge to keep science alive in Argentina and try to keep motivating the younger generations and keep them here. Maybe they can go abroad, learn, interact with other international colleagues, but then try to bring them back to our country.
Why did you apply to be an FCE?
Because we thought that creating an FCE could allow us to formalize or maybe provide an institutional framework for a series of projects that were in a way already ongoing. We thought that having this institutional umbrella involving doctors, biochemists, clinical biochemists and scientists from three different centers located just a few blocks apart, could help us to have more visibility, more opportunities to get funding. I think the fact that now we get together once a month and have meetings and tell each other what we are doing under the umbrella of this FCE has helped us a lot and helps us gain visibility in our community.
Anything else to add?
I’m very thankful for this opportunity. I’m very excited about participating in FOCIS. I hope I can contribute somehow from this southern corner of the world. I’d just like to repeat my enthusiasm about being here.
Those are all the questions for today, thank you for your time.