Kennedy Trust Transition Fellowships
Dr Lakshanie Wickramasinghe was awarded to support her project titled: Keratin-17: the missing piece of the puzzle to link joint, skin and eye inflammation.
Patients with Psoriatic Arthritis and Psoriasis frequently experience vision impairment caused by Anterior Uveitis (AU), a serious inflammatory eye disease that can lead to blindness. Current treatments like steroids, provide only temporary relief and often cause harmful side effects. Dr Wickramasinghe will use a combination of advanced microscopic imaging, a newly developed 3D model of the human iris and an experimental mouse model of AU to investigate how the protein Keratin-17 (KRT17) drives inflammation in the eye to identify potential therapeutic targets. She will also explore how mechanical stress, a feature common to the skin on elbows, the joint and the iris, can worsen inflammation in these tissues. This research has the potential to lead to better treatments by targeting the root causes of the disease rather than just its symptoms.
Dr Alice Bertocchi received the award for her research: Microbial metabolite sensing: identification of new immunoregulatory checkpoints that control tolerance.
To maintain a healthy gut, Dr Bertocchi has developed different systems (checkpoints) to control and efficiently interpret microbiotas’ stimuli. Genetic alterations at these checkpoints can trigger the development of inflammatory disease.
The Kennedy Trust’s new Transition Fellowship scheme, launched in October 2024, provides between £250k to £500k over five years to support talented postdoctoral researchers as they establish independent research careers. This fellowship is a vital step in developing future leaders in rheumatology, immunology, and inflammatory disease research.
Research Ignition Award
Dr Adrien Hallou, Group Leader in Tissue Biology and Principal Investigator of the Laboratory of Cell & Tissue Dynamics, received a Research Ignition Award in partnership with Dr Ruby Peters of the University of Sheffield. The award aims to pump-prime innovative and ambitious avenues of research, and for Adrien it will allow him to focus on developing ‘A label-free imaging method to determine the mechanical properties of human tissues in inflammatory diseases’. Adrien says: ‘Tissue stiffening and extracellular matrix remodelling are hallmarks of numerous inflammatory diseases, such as rheumatoid arthritis, psoriasis and IBD. There is an urgent need for simple, cost-effective, non-invasive tools that can link extracellular matrix structure to tissue stiffness in a clinical setting. I am delighted that the Kennedy Trust is supporting the translation of our interdisciplinary research on the mechanobiology of inflammation with this Ignition Award, and I am looking forward to working with Ruby to develop a new, AI-powered technology that can estimate tissue stiffness directly from the standard histology sections used by pathologists for diagnostics.’