Cecilia Arlehamn, PhD

Cecilia Lindestam Arlehamn, PhD, is research assistant professor at La Jolla Institute for Immunology. Cecilia has focused her career on understanding the T cell-mediated immune response to foreign pathogens, as well as self-antigens. She has co-authored more than 60 peer-reviewed publications on diverse topics such as tuberculosis, autoimmunity, specific T cell subsets, and allergic disease. Her work has identified T cell epitopes and characterized T cell subsets involved in the immune response against tuberculosis. Dr. Lindestam Arlehamn’s lab has applied the same techniques to the identification of T cell epitopes from self-proteins such as alpha-synuclein, tau, and TDP-43 involved in neurodegenerative diseases, including Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s and ALS disease, together with members of this team. The alpha-synuclein-specific T cell responses implicated in Parkinson’s disease strengthened the evidence for an autoimmune aspect to the disease and identified a temporal relation of alpha-synuclein-specific T cell reactivity and disease progression.