Tobias Käser: Phenotypic and functional characterisation of porcine regulatory T cells (Tregs)

Born in 1979 in Göppingen, Germany, I began my studies in Biology in 1999 at the Eberhard Karls University in Tübingen, Germany. In 2004 I moved to Vienna for my diploma thesis at the Clinical Immunology of the VUW. I finished my studies in Biology in 2005 and started my PhD thesis about the phenotypic and functional characterisation of porcine Tregs in 2006. In the last years, we were able to identify porcine Tregs, in the CD4+CD25high T-cell subset and we further analysed their phenotype and functions. These cells show a considerable IL-10 production and a remarkable suppressive capacity- the functional hallmark of regulatory T cells. In the meantime, these first data were published in „Veterinary Immunology and Immunopathology“.Our future work will concentrate on Treg interactions with other subpopulations of the immune system, the molecular mechanisms of Treg suppression and on further analysis of porcine Foxp3.