Parasites form fascinating interactions with the host immune system, invading target cells, activating novel phenotypes and manipulating immune responses to ensure survival.
Immunoparasitologists study these at multiple levels from single cell sequencing, through live imaging of infected cells and tissues, to manipulating gene expression in parasites and hosts to define molecular partners that determine the outcome of infection.
Taken together, our discoveries enable design of new therapies and vaccines while shedding light on a vital arm of the immune system that has evolved to protect us from parasitic infections.
Prof James Brewer | Head of Immunology
Parasites have fascinating interactions with the host anatomy and immune system which can only be fully participated in vivo, in the intact host. We have employed state of the art intravital imaging approaches to interrogate these interactions in disease models of malaria and sleeping sickness. We also undertake detailed immunophenotyping (transcriptomics, metabolomics) of immune responses in human and mouse malaria infections to investigate the cellular and molecular immune responses in infected hosts. |
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Prof Paul Garside | Chair in Basic Immunology
I study fundmental aspects of immune tolerance and priming and translate findings into the contexts of infectious and autoimmune disease. |
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Dr Megan MacLeod | Senior Lecturer (Immunology)My expertise is in immunological memory - understanding how past infections and inflammatory events shape our future immune responses. We want to know how memory immune cells function, how they influence the environments in which they live, and how these environments feedback on the memory cells. We aim for the new knowledge we learn to open up avenues to improve the functions of immune memory cells by vaccination and to inhibit these cells when they are root cause of disease, for example in autoimmunity. |
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Professor Rick Maizels | Professor (Parasitology)
The Maizels Lab studies how parasites manipulate the immune system through secreted immunomodulators, and how those modulators might offer novel anti-inflammatory therapies. |
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Prof Kevin Maloy | Professor Mucosal ImmunologyI’m a mucosal immunologist, studying immune responses in the intestinal tract and their impact on protective immunity and harmful inflammation. |
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Prof Simon Milling | Deputy Head of Immunology
My lab focusses on the immunology of the intestine. We study cellular and mechanisms by which macrophages and dendritic cells control intestinal immune responses. We translate these insights in studies of human inflammatory and autoimmune diseases including ankylosing spondylitis, psoriatic arthritis, inflammatory bowel disease, and alopecia areata. |
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Dr Thomas Otto | Senior Lecturer in Immunology
I am computer scientist with the interest to apply omics methods to biological problems and build computational tools to integrate and analyse the data. |
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Dr Georgia Perona-Wright | Senior Lecturer (Immunology)What determines the best type of immune response to infection? The tissue, the threat, or the timing? We use parasites, bacteria and viruses to probe the immune system in action, looking to understand the control points that could be used for therapeutic manipulation. |
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Dr Miguel Pineda | ARUK Research Fellow (Immunology)In health, synovial fibroblasts provide structural and nutritional support within the joint, but increasingly are recognized to serve as critical regulators of the inflammatory microenvironment in disease. Why do synovial fibroblasts adopt an inflammatory phenotype in RA? My aim is to understand the signals that rewire fibroblasts into a disease perpetuator, with special interest in the biological information contained in the cell glycome and glycobiology of disease. |
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