Roberto Mallone, MD, PhD, and his colleague Sylvaine You, PhD, launched a satellite lab at the Indiana Biosciences Research Institute (IBRI) in 2023 that is focused on exploring autoimmune T cells and understanding type 1 diabetes (T1D) mechanisms to develop T-cell-based biomarkers and therapeutics.
After he completed a postdoctoral fellowship with Gerald Nepom, MD, PhD, at the Benaroya Research Institute in Seattle, he moved to Paris, where he is currently a professor of clinical immunology at Paris Cité University, a diabetologist at the Cochin Hospital and leader of a research team at the INSERM Cochin Institute.
His major contributions to the field include the isolation of islet-reactive CD4+ and CD8+ T cells from the blood of T1D patients, the demonstration of the central role of CD8+ T cells in beta-cell autoimmunity, the development of T-cell monitoring tools to clarify therapeutic mechanisms in clinical trials, and the exploration of perinatal vaccination strategies to improve thymic immune tolerance mechanisms.
More recently, he described a universal state of ‘benign’ islet autoimmunity imprinted in the thymus (“Islet-reactive CD8+ T cell frequencies in the pancreas, but not in blood, distinguish type 1 diabetic patients from healthy donors,” Science Immunology, 2018) and the first immunopeptidome of human beta cells (“Conventional and neo-antigenic peptides presented by beta cells are targeted by circulating naïve CD8+ T cells in type 1 diabetic and healthy donors,” Cell Metabolism, 2018).