Charlotte Zajc, PhD
Department of Blood Group Serology and Transfusion Medicine
Position: Research Associate (Postdoc)
ORCID: 0000-0002-9356-7430
charlotte.zajc@meduniwien.ac.at
Keywords
Immunotherapy, Adoptive; Intracellular Signaling Peptides and Proteins; Mutant Chimeric Proteins
Research interests
We are engineering next generation cellular therapies, such as TCR-therapies and CAR T cells. For that purpose, we are combining methods from protein engineering (directed evolution) with immunological assays to unravel the mechanisms of T cell signaling and function and to translate our findings into designing better therapies.
Techniques, methods & infrastructure
- Directed evolution
- Yeast surface display
- Flow cytometry
- (CAR) T cell assays (cytotoxicity, activity, phenotype, cytokine analysis)
- T cell signaling (phosphoFlow, proximity ligation assay)
Selected publications
- Zajc, C.U. et al. (2024) ‘Small molecule-regulated switches to provide functional control of CAR T cells within the patient’, Expert Opinion on Biological Therapy, 24(6), pp. 425–432. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/14712598.2024.2371034.
- Zajc, C.U. et al. (2020) ‘A conformation-specific ON-switch for controlling CAR T cells with an orally available drug’, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 117(26), pp. 14926–14935. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1911154117.
- Zajc, C.U. et al. (2020) ‘Driving CARs with alternative navigation tools – the potential of engineered binding scaffolds’, The FEBS Journal, 288(7), pp. 2103–2118. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1111/febs.15523.