Alessandro Sette

In 2020, Sette published the first study of SARS-CoV-2 epitopes targeted by the human immune system. He has co-led research into CD8+ and CD4+ T cell responses in COVID-19 patients and studied CD8+ T cell cross-reactivity to SARS-CoV-2 epitopes and other coronaviruses.

In the mid-80s, at the same time as  Paul Allen in Emil Unanue’s lab, Sette together with Soren Buus in Howard Grey’s lab reported the first direct evidence that MHC molecules’ function is to bind antigenic peptides and present them to the T cell receptor, which triggers a T cell response. Follow-up work explained MHC restriction. In 1989, utilizing an Apple IIe, Sette wrote the first algorithm to predict peptide binding to two murine MHC alleles and over the course of the next 25 years, he defined motifs associated with over one hundred different class I and class II MHC variants expressed in humans, chimps, macaques, gorilla, horse, and mice. He discovered and characterized how MHC variants can be grouped according to broad common functional specificities (MHC supertypes), greatly facilitating epitope classification, characterization and understanding the basic rules of epitope-MHC interactions.

In 1988, Sette moved to San Diego to conduct research at San Diego biotech Cytel. He then co-founded Epimmune. In 2003, Sette joined the faculty of La Jolla Institute for Immunology.

Alessandro Sette is an Italian immunologist. He was born on August 11, 1960, in Rome, Italy, to Pietro Sette, a prominent Italian businessman and politician, and Renata Sette. Sette is a professor at La Jolla Institute for Immunology (LJI). He is an adjunct professor at the University of California, San Diego. Sette studies the specific epitopes that the immune system recognizes in cancer, autoimmunity, allergy, and infectious diseases.