Gene Regulation Lab

My laboratory studies how the development of immune cells is controlled. This process is critical to protect us against the many potentially harmful micro-organisms in the environment. Developing immune cells have many decisions to make, from deciphering the early signals that initiate their formation from rare blood stem cells, through to strategic responses in the body about whether to ignore or attack foreign organisms. These decisions are important as errors in the immune system result in diseases such as autoimmunity and leukaemia.

My research aims to decipher how these cellular decisions are made and the consequences for our protective immunity.

Our mission is to gain an understanding of how our immune system is set up and pinpoint what goes wrong in diseases of rogue immune cells such as autoimmunity and blood cell cancers. We aim to use this knowledge to discover new approaches to treat these diseases.

Our lab has made important contribution to the understanding of how our immune system responds to infections, in particular how the antibody that provides the beneficial effects of immunization is produced.

We discovered how a rare, but important cell type, the plasma cell, produces this antibody and how another cell type, the dendritic cell, acts as the coordinator of the immune response throughout the body.