Understanding how the immune system exerts its protective function against pathogens such as viruses and bacteria is fundamentally important for designing more rapid and targeted interventions. The need for accelerated development of preventative and therapeutic interventions was recently highlighted by the COVID pandemic and other epidemiological threats, whose frequency will increase as the human population grows. An impressive application of such understanding, namely stimulating the response of the immune system against cancer, has already become the pillar of anti-cancer immuno-therapies, which in the last few years have revolutionised cancer care. However, developing theoretical models that can guide immunological research by generating mechanistic insights into the behaviour of the immune system is an extremely difficult challenge due to the different scales of immunological regulation interacting and feeding back into each other. Motivated by this need and challenge, as well as by the potential to bring about novel and critically important insights, this workshop on Adaptive immune recognition in infectious disease and cancer (AIMMREC) has been organised.

The workshop aims to advance our understanding of how adaptive immune recognition of infections and cancer, at the molecular level, are influenced by within-host factors and their interplay with the population scale. We do so by bringing together scientists working on the biophysics of adaptive immunity to infection and cancer, with theoretical, computational, or experimental backgrounds to foster cross-disciplinary approaches to solving problems in viral-immune and cancer-immune co-evolution.