Dr John M. Lindner

• Dr rer nat in Molecular Immunology, University of Freiburg and Max Planck Institute of Immunobiology and Epigenetics, 2013
• BS in Medical Microbiology & Immunology, University of Wisconsin – Madison, 2007

Dr John M. Lindner joined the College of Medicine and Health in June 2026 as an Associate Professor of Lymphocyte Receptor Recognition. He most recently served as the PI of Immunology Discovery with a focus on T cell receptor ligands at BioMed X Institute in Heidelberg, Germany, as well as Head of Research USA and recruiting globally. His work was previously funded by J&J Pharmaceuticals and investigated T lymphocyte recognition of antigens and how this specificity shapes protective or pathological immune responses. His lab developed T-FINDER, a highly sensitive platform for T cell receptor–antigen interaction discovery and characterisation. At University of Birmingham, he will integrate this and newly developed tools with his earlier work on B cell and antibody repertoires to study lymphocyte cooperation, with the goal of advancing immune-based therapies and improving treatment of autoimmune disease and cancer.

• Biomedical Science ‘Experimental Immunology’ module – Lymphocyte biology and V(D)J recombination lectures
• Cancer Sciences MRes ‘Cancer Immunology and Immunotherapy’ module – Cancer Vaccination lecture
• MSc Immunology and Immunotherapy – Cancer Vaccination lecture

Previously supervised: PhD in Class II HLA Antigen Presentation
Currently supervising: PhD in Post-translationally Modified TCR Epitopes

Areas of supervision: TCR epitope recognition, lymphocyte antigen receptor ligand discovery, B cell antigen recognition and processing, antibody discovering and engineering, adaptive immune system engineering.

We previously established a system for functional discovery and validation of T cell receptor ligands which is:

1) modular and compatible with complementary approaches to TCR discovery

2) adaptable to several levels of throughput, including screening millions of potential interactions and enabling de novo ligand identification, and 

3) highly sensitive, including a reporter cell line and system for T cell activation and a method for increasing antigen presentation to T cells

These elements together present a platform with the highest likelihood of discovering physiologically relevant interactions between T cells and their targets, as well as the ability to discover the most interactions per donor. Our early work established the sensitivity of the system in a number of proof-of-concept studies. We are currently building on this work to develop a new generation of lymphocyte activation reporter systems which will leverage infrastructure at University of Birmingham to perform high-throughput de-orphanisation studies across a wide range of ligand types, lymphocyte subsets, and human diseases.