Dr Jennie (Hsiu Mien) Yang

Biography

Jennie is a Research Fellow working in Timothy Tree’s group in the Autoimmunity and Immunoregulation Laboratory. As part of our Type 1 diabetes (T1D) research, we are using state-of-the-art technologies, continuously designing, optimising and achieving robust assays that we then use to perform comprehensive immune monitoring for clinical trials and longitudinal studies. Primarily we receive blood samples to monitor change in immunophenotypes and function of a broad range of peripheral blood cell subsets for trials that aim to either deplete or modulate pathogenic cells or to induce tolerance, for example, by increasing the number or function of regulatory T cells, ultimately to preserve pancreatic beta cell function. Since T1D is a very heterogeneous autoimmune disease, the aims of therapies are not only to assess safety and efficacy of the treatment but also to identify potential biomarkers that could stratify subjects with T1D and target different subsets of individuals to different therapies to maximise their chance of responding to the treatment.