Asya Rolls

Asya Rolls is an Israeli psychoneuroimmunologist and International Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator and an associate professor at the Immunology and Center of Neuroscience at Technion within the Israel Institute of Technology. Rolls leads a lab that explores how the nervous system affects immune responses and thus physical health. Her recent work has highlighted how the brain’s reward system is implicated in the placebo response and how brain-immune interactions can be harnessed to find and destroy tumors.
Early life and education.
Rolls completed her undergraduate degree in Life Sciences at the Technion within the Israel Institute of Technology. After she obtained a Bachelors of Science, Rolls stayed in the department of Physical Chemistry at the Israel Institute of Technology for her Master’s.
Following her Master’s, Rolls pursued her graduate studies at the Weizmann Institute in Israel. Rolls pursued research in neuroimmunology under the mentorship Michal Schwartz within the Department of Neuroscience and Ofer Lider in the Department of immunology. Her graduate work focused on exploring how the immune system impacts neurogenesis and brain repair. Rolls explored the role of Toll-like Receptors in neurogenesis and found that TLR2 and TLR4 play opposing roles in the proliferation of new hippocampal neurons. TLR2 seemed to promote neurogenesis and TLR4 seemed to impair neurogenesis, all through MyD88 signalling. Rolls then explored the neurogenesis in pregnancy, to understand by learning and memory impairments are common in pregnant women.  Rolls completed her PhD in 2007.
In 2008, Rolls received the Fulbright Scholarship which allowed her to pursue her postdoctoral training at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California. She worked in the Department of Psychiatry under the mentorship of Luis de Lecea and Craig Heller , exploring the impact of sleep on brain homeostasis and memory. Rolls first used optogenetics to dissect the role of sleep in memory consolidation. By activating orexin neurons optogenetically, Rolls was able to fragment sleep after learning and found that this impacted memory the following day. Interestingly, the memory impairment only occurred if the minimal unit of uninterrupted sleep was below 62% of the normal. Rolls later explored the importance of sleep in fear memory consolidation. She found that specifically preventing protein synthesis during sleep caused decreases in fear memory formation highlighting the role of sleep in memory consolidation. To further show the impact that sleep can have on health, Rolls and her team explored the role of sleep in the engraftment and implantation of hematopoietic stem cells (HSCs) in mice. They found that sleep deprivation significantly decreased the expression of suppressor of cytokine signalling gene which impaired the migration and homing of HSCs. Their findings emphasized the importance of sleep in the success of bone marrow transplantation.
Career and research.
In 2012, Rolls was appointed to group leader at the Technion at the Israel Institute of Technology. She is now an assistant professor in the Rappaport Medical School and is the principal investigator of the Rolls Lab. Roll’s lab explores the connection between the brain and the immune system. She specifically focuses on how the biological mechanisms underlying emotions and cognition affect immune function and physical health. One innovation that the Rolls Lab pioneered is the merging of DREADDs technology with CyTOyF mass-cytometry to enable the high resolution measurements of the immune system after neuronal stimulation and inhibition. Rolls is a member of The Israel Young Academy. 
Reward system and immunity.
Rolls was one of the first to establish the link between the brain’s reward system and the immune system. Her interest in this connection came from the placebo effect. The placebo effect works from the cognitive processes generating positive expectations, but how exactly these processes lead to healing or feeling better were unknown. Rolls found that using DREADDs to activate the ventral tegmental area reward circuitry lead to an increase in the innate and adaptive immune responses in mice upon exposure to bacterial insults.
Following up this study, Rolls was interested in exploring the role of cognitive processes in tumor immunity. Since regulation of immune function is important in approaching potential treatments for cancer, Rolls explored how the brain’s reward circuitry was capable of modulating tumor immunity. Strikingly, they found that using DREADDs to activate the brain’s reward the circuitry lead to decreases in tumor size and that myeloid derived suppressor cells are critical to allowing the reward system to impact tumor growth.
Characterizing immune system in the brain.
Rolls has pioneered the use of CyTOF mass cytometry in the characterization of immune cell populations in the brain. She and her team recently characterized previously unknown populations of T, B, Dendritic, and NK Cells  in the brain using this method and found that CD44 is a common marker of infiltrating immune cells. Using CyTOF analysis, Rolls and her team found that after sleep deprivation, B cells begin to infiltrate the brain parenchyma, highlighting the impacts of sleep deprivation on the immune environment in the brain.