CYTO 2025: Mario Roederer Tribute

No CMLE Credits offered

The Brightest Light in Flow Cytometry and My Career: A Tribute to Mario Roederer
Pratip K. Chattopadhyay, PhD - CEO, Founder Talon Biomarkers, CSO, terraFlow Bioinformatics
In 2003, when I joined Mario Roederer’s lab at the NIH, few could imagine a world full of high parameter flow cytometers. I certainly could not have envisioned the success I had under his wing, nor could I have predicted the career he inspired me to in government, academia, and industry. Even today, eight years removed from his lab, there isn’t a day that I don’t think of him or speak of some soft skill that I learned from him. And for most people in flow cytometry, a day doesn’t go by without touching or doing something that Mario developed, explained, or influenced. It’s not hard to celebrate Mario’s innovation in technology, and – though perhaps we don’t talk about them enough – it is easy to appreciate the important contributions he made in immunology. We’ll catalogue those, and discuss their impact, in this presentation and the other talks in the session. I will also share behind-the-scenes stories of our innovative and ground-breaking work together. And, most importantly, I hope to convey some of the lessons I learned watching him and describe their indelible impact on me. Mario influenced me as a scientist in so many ways – at many different wavelengths, one might say – my talk will aim to capture the brightness of that light.

Understanding memory T-cell differentiation: from ImmunoTechnology to Translational Immunology
Enrico Lugli, PhD - Laboratory of Translational Immunology and Flow Cytometry Core, IRCCS Humanitas Research Hospital
Following pathogen or tumor clearance, T cells survive giving rise to long-lived memory T cells, providing a faster and more powerful response upon secondary challenge. The memory T cell pool is highly diverse, comprising subsets of less differentiated cells with improved persistence capacity and differentiation potential, and subsets of terminally differentiated cells with immediacy of effector functions but limited persistence. The precursors, now commonly referred to as stem-like memory T cells, have been show to maintain immunological memory following acute and chronic infection, to exert the most potent anti-tumor functions following adoptive cell transfer and to generate long-lived effector progenies in response to cancer immunotherapy with checkpoint blockade. During this talk, I will review the discovery of stem-like memory T cells during my post-doctoral fellowship in the laboratory of Mario Roederer at the NIH, how this key event under Mario’s guidance shaped my subsequent career as an independent investigator and, above all, how it inspired a multitude of preclinical and clinical studies on the use of these cells for the benefit of patients with cancer and chronic viral infections. In the last part of the talk, I will mention our current contribution to enhance stem-like T cell responses in response to cancer immunotherapies. Acknowledgements - AIRC 5×1000 program UniCanVax 22757

A journey through science wonderland - My postdoctoral training in the Roederer lab
Thomas Liechti, PhD - National Institutes of Health
Yolanda Mahnke, PhD - President, FlowHowYouKnow, Scientific Advisor, FluoroFinder
I started my postdoctoral training in Mario Roederer’s lab at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in 2017. Little did I know that the next 5 years would become one of the most rewarding times in my career. There I was, part of a group with some of the brightest minds in the field of immunology and cytometry and got to experience the sheer unlimited possibilities that the NIH has to offer. A cornerstone of the NIH is the highly collaborative environment. In Mario’s lab we lived up to these standards with the goal to democratize science. Mario has made it his mission to build sophisticated immunological tools, which enable the community to tackle complex scientific questions. Most of us, whether knowingly or unknowingly, tremendously benefited from those technological advancements and immunological discoveries. Besides his remarkable scientific contributions, Mario is heavily invested in mentorship, which has been critical for the professional progress of his trainees. It is my distinct pleasure to speak at this session in honor of Mario’s career. I will share my experience as a postdoctoral trainee at the NIH and how Mario’s mentorship impacted my career and my approach to science and mentorship.

A tale of excellence, in a government/industry partnership
Bob Balderas - VP Biological Sciences, BD Distinguished Fellow
In 2015, a platform technology program was established under a CRADA between The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) and Becton, Dickinson and Company (BD), to optimize advanced multicolor flow cytometry for immune discovery in preclinical and clinical evaluation of novel vaccine candidates, as well as to develop tools and approaches for in-depth analysis of immune responses elicited by vaccination or natural infection. The program was established to advance the state of the art for flow cytometry, thereby advancing the state of cellular systems analysis through an integrated solution, effectively marrying and optimizing a new generation of software, reagents, and instruments to advance early vaccine development. A broad systems approach to flow cytometry was created to cover software, reagents, and instrumentation to enable extremely high content, high throughput flow cytometry. Specific project goals were mutually developed for an integrated solution to generate more considerably broader, biologically relevant information from rare cells and/or small samples. To accomplish these goals, two project teams were established across NIH and BD. A cadence of monthly meetings were held to facilitate the project, technologies were shared, a base instrument was developed, ideas were integrated into many subassemblies and the eventual creation of a 50 parameter, conventional flow cytometer. Success of this project was attributed to both teams, but today, we wanted to share the experience that we had with Mario and his team. It was truly an opportunity to learn, to share, to watch a mentor invent, to critique and complete what at that time was the first HP flow cytometer in our community.

CMLE Credit: 1.0