Discovering the CD19 project with Ilona TESTA !

As part of our video portrait series dedicated to NVDIAG LabCom students, we’re today giving the floor to Ilona, a final-year student at Polytech Marseille and enrolled in a Master 2 in Health Biology – Oncology at Faculté des sciences médicales et paramédicales Aix Marseille Université.

Her internship project at the Laboratoire d’Ingénierie des Systèmes Macromoléculaires (LISM)? Developing nano-antibodies targeting CD19, a B-cell surface protein at the heart of haemato-oncology therapies. The originality of her approach: identifying nano-antibodies able to recognise epitopes distinct from those already exploited by existing therapies — with the goal of improving CD19 detection, including post-treatment, when certain epitopes may become less accessible.

On a daily basis, Ilona works with extracellular vesicles (EVs) displaying CD19 in a native membrane context, and characterises her nano-antibody candidates using ELISA, flow cytometry and BLI — an approach at the core of our EV-nAb platform expertise.

What stands out from her portrait? A student driven by a genuine passion for research, who finds in every experiment — successful or not — a reason to keep going.

Training the next generation of researchers is a central mission of the LabCom. Ilona is a great example of that.