Christian Brander obtained a PhD in Immunology at the University of Bern and completed his post-doctoral training at Harvard Medical School, focusing on T cell immunity to viral infections. He led several international efforts to build HIV research capacities across Southern Africa and Central and South America. He joined ICREA in 2008 with an appointment at IrsiCaixa and as the scientific director of the Catalan HIV vaccine program HIVACAT. He is a co-inventor of the "HTI" immunogen, which was acquired by Gilead Sciences in 2024. He serves as a curator of the Los Alamos HIV Database and is an Associate Professor at the University of Vic.
Research interests
Our group aims to understand the cellular immunity to viral infections in different disease contexts. Using detailed immune analysis and integrated -omics approaches, we seek to identify functional correlates of virus control and to explore the underlying cellular and molecular mechanisms that mediate such control. We combine immune assays with methylome, communicome and transcriptomics analyses to assess to what degree and at which stages of different viral infections the effector function profiles of virus-specific T cells are epigenetically controlled. We are especially interested in understanding these mechanisms in lympho-proliverative and neurological diseases driven by these viral infections and pay special attention to TCR repertoires of the involved T cells and their antigen specificities.
Selected publications
- Olvera A, Romero-Martin L, Oriol-Tordera B, Rosas-Umbert M, Escribà T, Mothe B, Brander C 2024, 'Impact of ChAdOx1 or DNA Prime Vaccination on Magnitude, Breadth, and Focus of MVA-Boosted Immunogen-Specific T Cell Responses', Vaccines, 12 - 3 - - - 279.
- Blanco-Heredia, J et al. 2024, 'Converging and evolving immuno-genomic routes toward immune escape in breast cancer', Nature communications, 15 -1 -1302.
- Moraes-Cardoso, I et al. 2024, 'Immune responses associated with mpox viral clearance in men with and without HIV in Spain: a multisite, observational, prospective cohort study', Lancet microbe, 5 -8 -100859.
Selected research activities
Dr. Brander serves on the SAB of the African BRILLIANT consortium, which brings together investigators from 18 different sites in East-, West- and South Africa and which is focused on the development of a prophylactic HIV vaccine and local capacity building that should facilitate future vaccine responses to HIV as well as other infectious diseases. In his role, he advises on the inclusion of T- and B- cell immunogens in potent vaccine vectors and their early clinical testing.These activities go hand-in-hand with a new $ 18m NIH-funded initiative (OptiFlip) that brings together researchers at UC Davis, Johannesburg and IrsiCaixa to explore strategies to engage potent T cell responses in the induction of protective HIV-specific humoral immunity.
Dr. Brander has also served as the CSO at Irsicaixa´s spin-off AELIX Therapeutics, which has been acquired in its entirety by Gilead Sciences during 2024. Dr. Brander continues in the further development of AELIX´s HTI Immunogen sequence and is directing the immune analyses in the BCN-03 clinical trial, which was sponsored by IrsiCaixa and which combined the HTI immunogen sequence with antibody inducing B cell antigens.