Bio:

Anna-Maria Globig is an Assistant Investigator at the Allen Institute for Immunology. Anna was born and raised in Germany and obtained her medical degree from the Albert-Ludwigs-University in Freiburg. During her doctoral thesis, she investigated the immunological pathogenesis of inflammatory bowel disease. She then trained in Internal Medicine at the University Medical Center Freiburg before joining Susan Kaech’s lab at the Salk Institute in La Jolla as a Postdoctoral Fellow. In her postdoctoral work, she identified a new pathway how the body’s nervous system suppresses immune responses to viral infections and cancer. Specifically, the nerves promote a process termed T cell exhaustion, wherein T cells, a specialized type of immune cell, become worn out and gradually lose their power in the fight against infections or tumors. Her research shows that this interaction between nerves and T cells can be therapeutically targeted with clinically established drugs, which improves the efficiency of conventional immunotherapies in the treatment of various cancer types, such as melanoma and pancreatic cancer.