Hallou Group | Cell and Tissue Dynamics

adrien.hallou@kennedy.ox.ac.uk

Work in the Hallou Lab is focused on understanding how mechanical and biochemical signals control cell fate decisions and tissue dynamics in development, health and disease.

Our work investigates how mechanical and biochemical signals, particularly those associated with the extracellular matrix and with epithelial, stromal, and immune cells, combine to regulate cell fate decisions during development, homeostasis, regeneration, and disease. To this end, we develop innovative experimental and computational approaches integrating mechanobiology, spatial genomics, advanced microscopy, machine learning/artificial intelligence, and mathematical modelling to study the mechanical and biochemical environments of in vivo tissues and organoid cultures at the level of individual cells. Our work is highly interdisciplinary, and we actively collaborate with clinicians, as well as mathematical biologists, biostatisticians, and computer scientists.

Aim

Develop new computational and experimental tools to understand the role of mechanical and biochemical signals in cell fate decisions and tissue dynamics in development, homeostasis, regeneration and disease.

Objectives

1. To develop an integrated spatial mechanomics platform to measure the molecular and mechanical state of cells in tissues at single resolution using advanced microscopy, spatial omics, image-based force inference, atomic force microscopy (AFM), mathematical modelling and ML/AI.

2. To map the mechanome of mouse and human tissues in development, homeostasis and disease, with a particular focus on inflammatory diseases (psoriasis, IBD, uveitis), fibrosis (IPF, scleroderma) and cancer.

3. To functionally characterise the biological and mechanical determinants of cell fate decisions and tissue dynamics using lineage tracing, intravital imaging and human organoid co-cultures with immune and stomal cells, combined with CRISPR-based genome editing and mechano-chemical perturbation experiments.

Our team

Adrien Hallou

Group Leader in Tissue Biology (Innovation Investigator Track)
Raphael Blain

Postdoctoral Research Associate
Lakshanie Wickramasinghe

Kennedy Trust Transition Fellow of Rheumatology and St Cross Knoop Research Fellow in Ophthalmology
Emry Cohenour

DPhil student
Anastasia Ardasheva

MB-DPhil student
Marcos Chinas Hernandez

DPhil Student
Dominic Buxton

MSc Student (Part II Biochemistry)
Garry Cherepakhov

MSc Student (Part II Biochemistry)
Aaron Syme

Biochemistry (Masters) student