CO-INVESTIGATOR

Cecilia Arlehamn, PhD

La Jolla Institute for Immunology

Cecilia Lindestam Arlehamn, PhD, is research assistant professor at La Jolla Institute for Immunology. Cecilia has focused her career on understanding the T cell-mediated immune response to foreign pathogens, as well as self-antigens. She has co-authored more than 60 peer-reviewed publications on diverse topics such as tuberculosis, autoimmunity, specific T cell subsets, and allergic disease. Her work has identified T cell epitopes and characterized T cell subsets involved in the immune response against tuberculosis. Dr. Lindestam Arlehamn’s lab has applied the same techniques to the identification of T cell epitopes from self-proteins such as alpha-synuclein, tau, and TDP-43 involved in neurodegenerative diseases, including Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s and ALS disease, together with members of this team. The alpha-synuclein-specific T cell responses implicated in Parkinson’s disease strengthened the evidence for an autoimmune aspect to the disease and identified a temporal relation of alpha-synuclein-specific T cell reactivity and disease progression.