Erdinc Sezgin, PhD

Senior Lecturer
Karolinska Institutet

Panelist

Erdinc Sezgin, PhD

Erdinc Sezgin, PhD, leads the Cell Signalling, Immunity and Nanoimaging (CSI:Nano) Lab at Karolinska Institutet and SciLifeLab in Stockholm, Sweden. His lab works on biophysical principles underlying cellular processes in health and disease, developing advanced imaging, chemical biology, and synthetic biology tools to reveal the molecular mechanisms governing cellular physiology and disease processes.

Hanna van Ooijen, PhD

Scientific Affairs Manager
Pixelgen Technologies

Panelist

Hanna van Ooijen, PhD

Hanna van Ooijen, PhD, serves as the scientific affairs manager at Pixelgen Technologies, a Stockholm-based biotechnology company advancing spatial proteomics and single-cell protein interactomics. In her role, she works at the intersection of immunology, translational research, and emerging spatial biology technologies, helping researchers apply advanced tools to better understand immune cell behavior in areas such as oncology, cell therapy, and autoimmune disease research. Hanna is particularly interested in how nanoscale organization and protein interactions shape immune cell activity, and she has contributed to scientific outreach and presentations on next-generation approaches for profiling immune cells at single-cell resolution.  She earned her PhD from KTH Royal Institute of Technology, where her research focused on understanding the factors that regulate cytotoxic immune cell function, with a particular emphasis on cellular heterogeneity and immune cell dynamics.

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The biophysical properties of the plasma membrane actively shape immune cell function, providing key insights into chronic disease and immune dysfunction. Measuring membrane order across immune cell populations can reveal functionally distinct cell states invisible to canonical surface markers and open new avenues for therapeutics.

In this GEN webinar, Erdinc Sezgin, PhD, Karolinska Institutet, will present how his lab profiled plasma membrane order across 12 immune cell subtypes simultaneously in healthy donors and patients with long COVID and chronic lymphocytic leukemia. He will also share how sorting NK cells by membrane order, combined with transcriptomics and the Proximity Network Assay (PNA) from Pixelgen Technologies, uncovered distinct subsets differing in cytotoxic potential, migratory capacity, and surface protein organization for biomedical applications.

Key takeaways include:

  • How plasma membrane order varies across immune cell types in chronic disease

  • Using biophysical membrane order to identify NK cell subsets that cannot be distinguished by surface markers alone

  • How spatial surface proteomics via PNA separates functionally distinct NK cell populations

  • How membrane order profiling can complement standard immunophenotyping workflows

    • A live Q&A session will follow the presentation offering you a chance to pose questions to our expert panelists.

    Produced with support from:

    The post Immune Cell Phenotyping: Cell Surface Architecture Informs Disease Biology appeared first on GEN - Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology News.