{"id":102,"date":"2024-08-21T15:08:11","date_gmt":"2024-08-21T14:08:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/irfluva-study\/?p=102"},"modified":"2025-01-22T09:27:26","modified_gmt":"2025-01-22T09:27:26","slug":"meet-the-irfluva-research-team-today-introducing-professor-katja-simon","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/irfluva-study\/meet-the-irfluva-research-team-today-introducing-professor-katja-simon\/","title":{"rendered":"Meet the IRFLUVA research team, today introducing Professor Katja Simon"},"content":{"rendered":"
Katja Simon is a global expert in immune ageing and a Distinguished Professor. She works at University of Oxford and Max Delbruck Centre (MDC). In early April, Katja Simon became the head of the \u201cAutophagy in the Immune System\u201d laboratory at the MDC.\u00a0 She and her collaborators at Cardiff University and University of Oxford have been researching how long-lived immune cells use the process of self-digestion to continually renew themselves in patients since 2021. Katja has spent much longer than this studying immune cell autophagy in other organisms, as autophagy is essential for many livings things including yeasts and all plant, animal, and human cells.<\/div>\n
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Katja says, ‘Cells are sustainability specialists. They eat all the organelles and larger molecular complexes that are no longer needed \u2013 in order to then reuse the waste products to build new structures. The name given to this cellular recycling process is \u201cautophagy. Without autophagy, cells could not develop or function normally. They would also age faster without it.\u201d<\/div>\n
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Katja grew up in Hamburg and Paris, she completed her university studies in Berlin: first at the Free University and then at the German Rheumatism Research Center (DRFZ Berlin), where she was the institute\u2019s first female PhD candidate. Simon then held postdoc positions in Marseille and Oxford, where she and her husband, British immunologist Professor Quentin Sattentau, raised three children.<\/div>\n
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Without autophagy, cells age much faster<\/h2>\n

Katja says, \u201cWe would like to discover more details about autophagy in long-term immune cells \u2013 such as memory T and B cells, whose benefits include ensuring that vaccinations provide protection for many years.\u201d We would like to search for substances that stimulate autophagy in immune cells. According to our hypothesis, this may be a way to rejuvenate the body\u2019s immune defenses, which get weaker with age.<\/p>\n

New strength for a weakened immune system<\/h2>\n

As a team we have already completed an initial clinical trial with 40 participants in the United Kingdom. Its aim was to explore whether a wheatgerm supplement, which activates autophagy in cells, can help the immune system to create better memory cells \u2013 and thus lengthen the protection afforded by Covid-19 vaccines. We are excited to publish the results of this study soon.<\/p>\n

The IRFLUVA Study follows on from this study with a focus on flu vaccination instead of COVID19 and we are looking forward to starting the trial very soon, on 30th September 2024.<\/p>\n