The Immunogenetics in Human disease group specializes in genetics and inflammatory mechanisms in complex diseases. The group’s research focuses on the complement system and its role in pregnancy complications. Besides reproductive immunology, inflammatory mechanisms in cardiovascular diseases are a second major topic. The group collaborates closely with experts in research related to vascular, autoimmune, and complex genetic diseases.
The group is led by docent of immunogenetics Inkeri Lokki. We are a uniquely translational complement genetics group with a wide network of international and domestic collaborators, clinicians and researchers. The group hosts researchers and students from all Academic levels and establishes in-house complement and genetic methodology. Additionally, Lokki teaches 2nd year medical students in bacteriology and immunology, providing the most up-to-date research-based university pedagogics to the doctors of the near future.
Strong genetic in-house pipeline optimization is at the core of the group. The group upkeeps and develops DNA and RNA based methodology at the Department of Bacteriology and Immunology.
The group has developed a whole blood scRNA method for transcriptomics approaches from all blood leukocytes stored in PAXgene RNA tubes. PCR and qPCR pipelines for analysis of genetic variants as well as C4A and C4B quantification and HLA analysis are established and published. MLPA-probing assays are used for complex rearrangements and copy number variation analysis of the CFHR region and others, while Nanopore-based adaptive long-read sequencing is used for analysis of immunomodulatory genes in a diagnostic panel fashion.
For complement and vascular diagnostics, the group has extended their expertise to ELISA and confocal microscopy-based methodology. Computational immunohistochemistry using Aiforia, micro computed tomography and 3D-modelling of protein and physiological morphologies are used for data analysis and visualization.
The group works on several sample cohorts and individual patients through collaborators of the group.
Complement samples are collected per patient in collaboration with treating clinicians. The Immunogenetics in Human Disease group works together with clinical experts from HUS and hospitals in Finland under the FINPIDD program, which aims to understand and improve clinical diagnostics of primary immunodeficiency disorders enriched in the Finnish population.
The group collaborates on the DIAMO-project in study of diabetic type 1 and 2 women and their pregnancies, complications, and gestational health. PI of DIAMO is Miira Klemetti-Pettersson. Finally, the group collaborates with Immunology in early pregnancy and pregnancy outcome cohort, which is an international collaborative study based on national registries and a population covering biobank of serum samples.