MIIM30003: Medical and Applied Immunology

Two 45 min MSTs worth 20%. 2 hr end of semester exam worth 60% (as with all MIIM subs)

Half of this subject is pretty much revision of Principles of Immunology and Molecules to Malady. You focus on diseases of the immune system as well as how it can guard against more specific infections from parasites, viruses and bacteria. There are heaps of lecturers in this subject, each usually presenting for no more than 1-3 lectures. So you do cover lots of fields, occasionally some things will overlap, but I dont't think it really detracted from the experience as all of them were quite good actually. Expect to be presented with familiar concepts from before!

That being said, this subject is pretty deceptive in terms of difficulty. Since a lot of the content is stuff you have sort of learnt before, you might find it quite easy to revise, but assessment is not that forgiving. For some reason me and many of my friends have done slightly worse in the MSTs for MedApplied than we did in Principles! So this subject can get pretty tricky at times - don't make the same mistake we did and assume your prior knowledge is enough to carry you.

MST1 will cover tolerance, antigen presentation, T-regs, as well as tumour and cancer immunotherapy. These build upon things you've learnt in Principles and M2M, but there is nothing that is signficantly difficult about this block of lectures. It's a pretty easy few weeks if you remember your immunology lectures from before. The median for MST1 was 30/40. Half of the MST2 block (barrier immunity to evolutionary immunology) is quite intensive actually. There is a lot of content in the viral immunity lecture especially - it was on par with a normal viral lecture, but don't freak out when you see all the lists of different examples that Scott puts on his lecture slides. Focus on the main pathways that he explains. For the evolutionary immunology lectures, yes you will also have to learn the Drosophila toll pathway and the Imd pathway and compare it to human TLR and TNF. The median for this block dropped to 27/40.

Post MST2 is pretty chill, as the allergies lectures are very similar to the ones used in Principles and the lectures on immunodeficiency, HIV and vaccinations are pretty straightforward. Reproductive immunology however is a major bitch to understand so focus a lot of time on this lecture - it is definitely the hardest lecture to understand in the course and to memorise. In the parasitic lecture you learn about malaria and lymphatic filiaris - if you've done M2M then malaria is no problem!

You also devote two lectures to analysing particular research papers (one on cross-presentation, the other on vaccine design). You probably don't need the specific detail from these lectures, but know what conclusions were made from each experiment (as well as what they generally did).

As with all the MIIM subjects, weekly feedback quizzes are your best friend for revision! The MSTs are all MCQ and there are typical Type I and Type II questions yet again. I always found the MSTs to be slightly more challenging and harder than waht I expected - I think there is less detail actually examined in the MSTs, what makes it difficult is that they trick you - there are definitely a few oooo snap I didn't see that moments!

Personally, I liked the other MIIM subjects more because half of the content was already kinda familiar for this subject, but this is still fantastic. It truly lives up to its name as you learn about so many diseases that either affect immune system's capacity to fight infections and tmours, or are a consequence of it losing every sense of self-control and going full beserk. While I think maybe there were a bit too many lecturers for my liking, it is only a minor complaint as everything still remained quite consistent and each lecturer seemed to have a clearly defined area to talk about. It is a pretty chill way to end your Immunology major!

Yes, with screen capture etc.

B. Heath (Tolerance)
J. A. Villadangos (Antigen Presentation)
I. van Driel (Immune Regulation)
D. Godfrey (Tumour Immunity)
P. Darcy (Cancer Immunotherapy)
T. Gebhardt (Barrier Immunity)
S. Mueller (Viral Immunity)
S. Bedoui (Bacterial Immunity)
G. Westall (Transplantation)
P. Gleeson (Autoimmunity)
K. Quinn (Evolutionary Immunology)
N. La Gruta (Allergies)
A. Brookes (Reproductive Immunology)
D. Fernandez-Ruiz (Parasitic Immunity)
B. Chua (Vaccinations)
L. Mackay (Immunodeficiencies, HIV)

No, but feedback quizzes are uploaded on the LMS every week.

4.25 out of 5

No textbook needed

3 x 1 hr lectures per week

Semester 2, 2015

H1 (89)