Lund is 2024–2025 Distinguished Faculty Lecturer

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rep lund uab medicine magazine 550pxFran Lund, Ph.D., director of the Heersink School of Medicine Immunology Institute, will deliver her Distinguished Faculty Lecture on March 18 at the Alumni House.Environment matters, whether you are an immune cell responding to an infection, a bright student looking for a major or a veteran scientist hoping to follow your discoveries from a lab dish to a patient’s bedside. Along the way, happy accidents may lead in new directions you never expected, especially if you are willing to follow your interests.

Looking back at the past 30 years of progress in immunology, and her own career path, Fran Lund, Ph.D., sees a similar mix of serendipity, curiosity and teamwork emerge as themes. She found immunology after picking microbiology out of the course catalog in college, both an essentially random choice and one guided by the fact that the major was small and sounded interesting. She decided to specialize in B cells, the antibody-producing arm of the immune system, because the rise of molecular biology meant that you could tackle big, new questions. And unlike T cells, then only recently discovered and attracting the bulk of attention from young immunologists, B cells seemed to offer more scope for exploration.


Foundational insights on immune responses

Under Lund’s direction, the HSOM Immunology Institute includes more than 350 members in seven UAB schools and 51 divisions and departments. Active funding of these researchers totals $110 million, from 18 NIH institutes.

Lund’s work has been crucial to demonstrating that chemical signals from B cells, known as cytokines, play a vital role in coordinating the magnitude, duration and quality of immune responses. That includes the beneficial defense of the body against viruses and other pathogens, but also the harmful responses to allergens and in attacking the body itself through autoantigens. Her other discoveries include foundational insights on how B cells develop and how they sense environmental cues. Those findings are being applied in ongoing studies of immune responses in lupus and in improving vaccines for flu and COVID, among others. Most recently, Lund and colleagues received an $18.5 million NIH U19 grant to study B and T memory cells in transplanted lungs, uteruses and kidneys.

Lund is an internationally renowned scientist, professor and Endowed Chair in Immunology in the UAB Department of Microbiology and director of the UAB Heersink School of Medicine Immunology Institute. She is one of the top recipients of NIH funding among all microbiologists and immunologists in the United States, and has more than 140 peer-reviewed publications in high-impact research journals. In 2022, after serving for 10 years as the chair of the Department of Microbiology, Lund launched the HSOM Immunology Institute. This past year, she became only the fifth UAB faculty member to be named a Distinguished Fellow of the American Association of Immunologists.


"An internationally recognized scientist"

Lund’s contributions as a researcher, collaborator and educator, and her service to UAB, have earned her recognition as the 2024–2025 Distinguished Faculty Lecturer. This is the highest honor bestowed by UAB’s academic health center on a faculty member who has advanced the frontiers of science and made outstanding contributions to education, research and public service. Lund will deliver her Distinguished Faculty Lecture on March 18 at the Alumni House.

“She is an internationally recognized scientist whose outstanding research accomplishments have been central to our understanding of how adaptive immunity works,” said Anupam Agarwal, M.D., senior vice president for Medicine and dean of the Heersink School of Medicine, and J. Victor Garcia-Martinez, Ph.D., chair of the Department of Microbiology, in a nomination letter. Lund is also an accomplished scientific leader, they noted. “During the decade she served as chair, the department climbed from #33 in NIH rankings to #8 in the country,” they wrote.

UAB’s tradition of collaborative science was one of the main attractions when Lund and her scientific partner and husband, Professor Troy Randall, Ph.D., came to Birmingham in 2012 from the University of Rochester. As microbiology department chair, and now as director of the Immunology Institute, Lund says she has been able to “help other people do science, which is a lot of fun.”

The UAB HSOM Immunology Institute is a cutting-edge interdisciplinary hub for faculty, researchers, clinicians, health policy experts and educators to advance the study of immunology and improve human health through immune-based therapies, including vaccines. Under Lund’s direction, it includes more than 350 members in seven UAB schools and 51 divisions and departments. Active funding of these researchers totals $110 million, from 18 NIH institutes.


A team effort

Lund is quick to point out that her work represents a team effort, starting with her scientific partner and husband, Troy Randall, Ph.D., professor and Meyer Foundation William J. Koopman, M.D., Endowed Chair in Immunology and Rheumatology in the UAB Department of Medicine. The two met on their first day of graduate school at Duke University, trained in the same lab and have worked out of a joint lab throughout their faculty careers. “I really consider what we do team science,” Lund said. “I’m more logical, and he is more creative, so we complement each other. When I give my lecture, it will be the story of what these two labs have done over the past 30 years.”

Immunology is so complex and multifaceted that research progress always depends on collaborations, both within and between institutions, Lund says. UAB’s tradition of collaborative science was one of the main attractions when Lund and Randall came to Birmingham in 2012 from the University of Rochester. As microbiology department chair, and now as director of the Immunology Institute, Lund says she has been able to “help other people do science, which is a lot of fun.”


Healthy Donor Cohort

The resources that HSOM has provided to the institute “have allowed us to build infrastructure that benefits the field of immunology as a whole,” Lund said. This includes investing in cutting-edge, multimillion-dollar equipment for emerging areas such as spatial biology. “But it is really about building capacity to do work that people can’t do on their own,” Lund said. One example is the Healthy Donor Cohort, one of the institute’s signature programs.

“If you are at a major clinical center like UAB, getting patient samples for multiple sclerosis, say, is very feasible,” Lund said. “But finding age- and sex-matched controls for those patient samples is much more difficult.” More than 850 people at UAB have joined the cohort, which will soon expand its recruitment outside the campus on its way to a goal of 5,000 participants. Researchers who want to examine the immunological differences in blood samples between patients with an autoimmune disease such as multiple sclerosis, and healthy people of the same age and sex, can get those samples through the Immunology Institute in a streamlined process.

More than 850 people at UAB have joined the Immunology Institute's Healthy Donor Cohort, which will soon expand its recruitment outside the campus on its way to a goal of 5,000 participants.

Participants in the Healthy Donor Cohort also have the option to agree to be contacted about other studies where they might be a good match. “That has turned out to be really helpful,” Lund said. “I was working on a study on flu vaccination, and I needed people in specific age ranges up to 90 years old. It would have taken me months to recruit participants by putting out flyers around campus. Instead, I had my entire study enrolled within hours.”


Helping scientists move from lab dishes to human studies

Almost every basic scientist has the desire to see their work move from lab dishes and animal models into human studies. “But the activation energy to do it is big,” Lund said. “We want to make that as simple as possible; we help with the IRB, and we help people isolate and interrogate primary human immune cells — whatever shortcuts we can create to make that translational work happen.”

One of the great things about immunology “is that it is truly a system,” Lund said. “You can look at it in the kidney, in the brain and all over the body. The institute has neurologists, gastroenterologists, pulmonary specialists and many more experts looking at the role of the immune system in health and disease.”

This is exactly the sort of atmosphere that Lund finds fits her best. “I find it exhilarating to engage with scientists who tackle similar questions but bring diverse approaches and mindsets to the table,” she said.


Current work: Immune memory, inflammation and vaccines

Work in the Lund-Randall Lab is following three general lines, Lund says. The first focuses on memory in the immune system “and understanding what is important for the development and maintenance of those cells,” she said. A normal B cell has a lifespan of three weeks, but a memory B cell can live for 50 years. “In vaccination, those are the cells that you are trying to generate,” Lund said. They are also one of the cells responsible for damage in the context of autoimmunity, transplant and allergy.

“I find it exhilarating to engage with scientists who tackle similar questions but bring diverse approaches and mindsets to the table,” Lund said.

The second area of interest for the lab is how inflammation, particularly chronic inflammation, changes the properties of cells. Chronic inflammation, in the context of B cells, “can change how easily they become antibody-secreting cells” and more, Lund said. “What are the cytokines that do the programming, and how does it change outcomes?”

The final area relates to vaccines, a long-standing interest of the lab, and particularly “how to get one that will cover the respiratory tract,” Lund said. The mucosal immune response in the nose and lungs is very different from the systemic response in the rest of the body, she points out. “If you give an injection in the arm, you get a systemic response that is good.” But the memory B and T cells, which will respond when the body meets the real virus you have vaccinated against, reside in the lymph nodes, and it will take a couple of days for them to react. An intranasal vaccine that promotes resident memory cells in the respiratory tract, on the other hand, would lead to a quicker response.

“We are working mostly now in flu vaccines and deliver them in different sites” using many different platforms, including the RNA-based vaccines that proved successful during COVID, along with adenovirus- and RSV-based vaccines. “We are interested mechanistically in why they work or not, and that comes down to spatial biology,” Lund said.

Just within the past two years or so, equipment has become available to allow researchers to zoom in on the interactions between individual cells in the context of their native three-dimensional environments. Spatial transcriptomics lets scientists see what genes a cell expresses in response to cytokines and other signals from surrounding cells. Spatial proteomics allows them to analyze what proteins are being made. “What is this cell making, and what is it seeing in its neighborhood?” Lund said. These environmental factors could offer a way to improve beneficial immune responses, and hamper negative responses, far more precisely than current treatments. That is one of those big questions that attracts Lund.

“I have kept a love of the same cell type over the past 30 years, but I have also done lots of different things,” Lund said. “I like that about science; you can be very curious and have the ability to ask very wide-ranging questions.”