Neutrophils, arguably the most important immune cells in the human body, play an essential role in fighting infection and helping the body heal. However, they have also been found to contribute to chronic inflammation and tissue damage linked to conditions such as arthritis, cardiovascular disease and cancer. This ability to both help and harm the body is caused by the neutrophils capacity to change their behaviour depending on where they are in the body and what signals they receive during disease or inflammation.
Irina Udalova, Professor of Molecular Immunology at the Kennedy Institute, has previously shown that transcription factors are key in defining the state and role of neutrophils in the bone marrow, blood and tissue. The 5-year funding from the Medical Research Council will enable Irina to take the research a step further and to explore the molecular networks that control how neutrophils change and behave in different diseases, in animal models and human tissues across the spectrum of arthritis causing conditions.
The team, which also includes Chris Buckley, Kennedy Professor of Translational Rheumatology, Helen Byrne, Professor of Mathematical Biology at the Mathematical Institute, and two early career researchers, Abdullah Khan, Wellcome Trust Career Development Fellow at the WIMM, and Abhinandan Deva Prasad, Postdoctoral Researcher in the Computational Genomics at the Kennedy Institute, aims to identify key regulators and pathways of these immune cell states, and to test whether these pathways could be targeted to reduce damaging inflammation.
Irina said: 'With this programmatic MRC funding and an outstanding research team, our vision is to build a much clearer picture of how these important cells change and adapt in different diseases. This has the potential to bring about a new class of treatments to target the harmful neutrophil states without completely depleting the beneficial neutrophils and have significant impact on the treatment of inflammatory diseases.'