My area of research involves studying how the immune system is kept in control in our body. If one thinks about our immune system, it becomes apparent that it is constantly trying to break free and react to pathogens but something keeps it in check.
This is the fundamental question we try to answer in our laboratory. We study this in an iterative manner by first identifying the cells that control our immune system, then studying the proteins expressed by the regulatory cells. Once we identify these regulatory cells, we can then manipulate them to enhance or control our immune system. I would say our work will help patients with both autoimmunity and cancer since in most cases these are two sides of the same coin.
The immediate relevance of our work lies in the field of cancer. Our work will benefit patients who are currently being treated with a therapy known as checkpoint inhibitor therapies (CPIs). This has become common frontline therapy for most skin cancers.
What this therapy does is breakdown the regulatory pathways that controls our immune system. As a consequence our immune system is unleashed against the cancer and kills the cancer. Unfortunately, this works very well only in a fraction of patients and we do not know why CPIs do not work in all patients.
In our laboratory we discovered that there is a particular type of immune cell that can initiate anti-cancer responses when CPI is administered and we are studying how to unleash this population on to cancer. We think individuals who have a lot of these novel immune cells will respond better to CPIs.
I enjoy the discovery aspect of research where we are constantly understanding so many novel regulatory pathways that are controlling our immune system. These days there are a number of technologies that allow for exploratory research. Combining this with our expertise in lymphocyte signalling has resulted in a number of fundamental discoveries which has made cutaneous immunology research very exciting at Newcastle.
I was very pleased to win the Lister Prize. I applied for it based on my conversation with Professor Neil Perkins where I was considering dropping this area of research within my laboratory since the research was just not funded by standard funding streams.
Neil then suggested I apply to an organisation that values fundamental research and blue-sky ideas from early career researchers and I thought I would send the work to the Lister and if unsuccessful, then draw a line under the programme. Luckily Lister decided to support this work which enables us to continue the research.
Thanks to Lister we were able to define a new immune cell that could enhance anti-tumour responses in the context of CPIs. We were only able to publish this work due to the funds we received through the prize. Personally for me it is a passion project and I am really pleased we were able to pursue this ‘out of the box’ idea and are now expanding the work to other cutaneous and liver cancer.
The NIHR BRC has been really valuable for developing and testing our fundamental ideas in patients. For example, we had some pilot funding from NIHR last year which has enable us to develop deep phenotyping technology to understand all the immune regulatory protein function in regulatory immune cells.
This is a one-of-a-kind study where we were able to compare and contrast the immune system in normal versus aged versus cutaneous cancer patients. This pilot funding has identified new functional regulatory pathways that we would never pursued in the absence of this consortium.
As I mentioned before, this is a really exciting time to be doing immune regulation work at Newcastle since we have some very new technologies, opportunity to do work on normal and dysregulated immune system and we can feed through our fundamental model discoveries to human health.