2022
OCTOBER 2022: Congratulations to the Miriam and team in the O’Connor lab for their publication in Acta Neuropathologica Communications, which described the immune profiling of MuSK myasthenia gravis patients before and after B cell depletion therapy. Sangwook and I were honored to collaborate with and learn from them regarding mechanisms of autoimmunity in MuSK myasthenia gravis.
MAY 2022: Congratulations to Kartik Devashish, who received the 2022 Roy and Diana Vagelos Prize for Achievement in Scientific Research. We were honored to have him in the lab for the last half of his senior thesis studying the role of CD4 and CD8 T cell subsets in CA(A)R T cells

FEBRUARY 2022: Congratulations to Christoph Ellebrecht, who is the newest tenure-track Assistant Professor at Penn Dermatology and the Center for Cellular Immunotherapies! You can visit him in 1005 BRB.
JANUARY 2022: The MuSK-CAART IND receives FDA clearance to initiate the MusCAARTes trial in MuSK autoantibody-positive myasthenia gravis! Thanks to all the Payne lab members who contributed, particularly Sangwook, Xuming, and Silvio, as well as our colleagues at Cabaletta Bio who collaborated on this project to bring MuSK-CAART forward from the proof-of-concept work in the laboratory to a first-in-human clinical trial. This has been an incredible journey to extend the CAART concept for antigen-specific B cell depletion to additional autoantibody-mediated diseases.