Q&A with new team of virologists at the Blizard Institute
We are delighted to welcome a world-leading team of virologists, cell biologists and educators to the Blizard Institute, marking an exciting new chapter for infection and immunity research, teaching, and public engagement at Queen Mary.
What’s the motivation to move to Queen Mary?
We think that the Blizard Institute is an amazing place for discovery science. It has great facilities, a huge amount of lab space including CL2 and CL3 containment, core provision of key technologies eg RNAi screening, microscopy, genomics and flow cytometry.
Our goal will be to contribute to a major expansion in infection and immunity research and teaching. This is already off to a great start with the newly funded TB centre. We hope to bring our track record of mentoring junior scientists through to independent fellowships and positions and the Blizard institute will provide the commitment and space to do that. By moving as a group, we bring a critical mass of investigators which we will build through new recruitments.
Who’s coming?
Professor Greg Towers is a molecular virologist working on innate immunity and viral infections including HIV and SARS-CoV-2.
Professor Clare Jolly is a viral cell biologist studying how HIV reprogrammes T cell biology and how this leads to AIDS.
Dr Matt Whelan, is a cell biologist using state of the art microscopes to understand how viruses get inside the cell nucleus and what they can do to manipulate our cellular machinery from inside.
Professor Richard Milne is a virologist and educator who works closely with Greg and Clare and will bring our research led teaching approach to QMUL.
Professor Emma Wall is a clinician-scientist in Infectious Diseases. She’s interested in understanding how we can optimise people’s immune response to infections and vaccines.
A group of around 15 post docs, PhD students and lab managers.
Will there be more recruitment?
We will be recruiting lecturer/reader/PhD positions and candidates for career fellowships.
What teaching will you establish?
We’ve really enjoyed developing approaches to research-informed teaching and we’re keen to bring these to Queen Mary. An obvious starting point is an MRes or similar in infection that would sit side by side with the expanded infection research programme in the Blizard. After that we’ll explore other opportunities. A key theme is to get everyone involved. PhD students, post-docs and ECRs gain hugely valuable career skills from preparing and delivering lectures and other teaching sessions. Teaching brings clarity of thought and, of course, fluency and confidence in communication.
Do you have plans for engaging the public with your science?
We do. Greg, Clare and Richard have a lot of experience working with primary and secondary school aged children. We have had a lot of fun developing demonstrations and sessions that bring discovery science and in particular, of course, infectious diseases, to life for these audiences. We think that it is really all about licensing curiosity. We’re looking forward to engaging with the Centre for the Cell and developing some new material. Also, we haven’t done much work with adult audiences, and we are really excited about the possibilities in that area.
Emma plans to continue to build on her work engaging with the public on both COVID-19 vaccines and Long COVID. She recently gave a public lecture at the Crick and has contributed to radio shows and podcasts with the BBC.
What are your science goals?
We use viruses as tools to understand cell biology and immunology. We argue that all human disease is either driven, or at least exacerbated, by inflammation. Inflammation has evolved to protect us from infection, but when that process goes wrong, disease ensues. Inflammation in the bowel causes inflammatory bowel disease, in the heart, heart disease, in the brain, dementia. Typically, the drivers for inflammation are unknown. We argue that by studying how viruses drive and manipulate inflammation, which they must do to ensure a successful infection process, then we can derive new knowledge of the drivers, and define new therapeutic targets, relevant to many important human diseases. We also seek to understand how immune cells work in health and disease, using viruses as tools to understand the fundamentals of their cell biology.
What are your most exciting recent discoveries?
Matt and Clare have worked out how HIV regulates the nuclear pore, making it bigger, allowing the HIV capsid to travel through without breaking up and revealing genome to innate immune sensors. This work revolutionises our understanding of how nuclear pores can regulate what goes in and out of the nucleus and how viruses can manipulate that for their own benefit.
Greg and colleagues have worked out key features of HIV that enable the most effective suppression of innate immunity that enabled it to become pandemic. They then showed that the SARS-CoV-2 variants of concern made similar adaptations to suppress innate immunity. Their most recent work with Clare demonstrates how SARS-CoV-2 can adapt and may even use a new way of evolving in which the virus has specific mechanisms to evolve specific proteins to facilitate adaptation to new species.
Emma and her team at the UCLH-Crick partnership have been studying how immunity to SARS-CoV-2 changes over time and the different ways people respond to both infections and vaccines. They are working on how COVID-19 vaccines and early infections provide cross protection to newer, unrelated variants, and plan to use these findings to design smarter, next-generation COVID-19 vaccines. They are also working hard on finding what causes long COVID, and looking forward to the outcome from their Long COVID trial STIMULATE-ICP later this year.
Looking ahead, the most exciting thing we are thinking about is how we can use AI to predict pandemics. We think that a key feature of pandemic viruses is their ability to overcome human innate and adaptive immunity – so-called viral escape. A key goal is to understand how viruses do this so that we can better predict how viruses escape immunity. The AI revolution in structural biology is transforming our approach to understanding protein evolution and function as well as drug development. It has really made us rethink what is possible.
What about funding?
Matt is a Wellcome Early Career Fellow and Greg and Clare hold Wellcome Investigator awards.
Both Greg and Clare are writing applications to develop broad spectrum host targeting anti-virals with collaborator medicinal chemist David Selwood (at UCL) and Greg also holds a Wellcome Discovery award with Peijun Zhang (University of Oxford), to study the HIV life cycle using cryo EM.
Emma is a Clinical Research Group Leader at the Crick with core funding from the UCLH-Crick partnership for the Legacy study. She holds a number of collaborative project awards to study both COVID-19 vaccines and Long COVID from Wellcome, NIHR and UKRI. She’s currently writing applications to discover new drug treatments for Long COVID using samples and data from the STIMULATE-ICP trial.
We also expect to apply for Centre-level funding to underpin the expansion of infection research in the Blizard Institute.
Finally, we have a strong record of success in mentoring ECR through the fellowship application and interview process and we plan to continue doing this at the Blizard. We’re very keen to hear from any potential applicants.