Profile

I’m originally from Devon but grew up in the Scottish Borders, then moved to the city of Dundee to study at university. I finished my undergraduate degree and stayed to do my PhD in scientific research.

You body’s immune system protects you against diseases, including bacterial infections and viruses.

The first branch of your immune system, called the innate immune system, has cells that patrol your body constantly and when they find something that shouldn’t be there, they send out messages all around the body. These messages are received by lots of other types of innate immune cells, who all rush to the site of detection and carry out their individual jobs to fight off whatever has invaded. In this process, swelling and heat will form around the site. You may also feel pain and in some cases pus will form. This is the part of the immune system that I work on.

Once the innate immune system has kicked in, the second part of the immune system gets involved – this part is called the adaptive immune system. I know relatively very little about this part so please no difficult questions! This is the part that generates antibodies against a pathogen and will ‘remember’ the infection so that you fight it off much quicker next time you encounter the same thing. This is the reason why you theoretically should never catch exactly the same cold twice!

Sometimes the immune system doesn’t work properly, or it goes into overdrive and starts attacking the body instead. Both of these will make people very ill and we don’t have enough treatments or cures for all these conditions.

The immune system has another important role in regulating your own body cells. Since the cells that make up your whole body don’t live forever, they divide every now and again to replace dead cells. Sometimes, this dividing process can go very wrong and instead of getting nice healthy cells after dividing, you get cells that have a lot of things wrong with them. The immune system can actually realise when this has happened and take actions to kill these cells to stop them causing any trouble with the delicate balance of your body. Sadly, the immune system isn’t perfect, especially in older people, and so it sometimes doesn’t spot these cells. Alternatively, the cells may have problems but not the specific types problems that the immune system can spot. If these cells are allowed to continue to live, some of these will have faults that cause they to divide uncontrollably, leading to many more cells with lots of issues. These cells can become cancer. Cancer treatments at the moment are very unpleasant with a lot of nasty side effects.

The aim of my research focuses around understanding one particular protein in the innate immune system. This protein is called IRAK-3 and is thought to act as an ‘off’ switch in immune cells to stop their function in good time before they accidentally cause damage. However, in cases of the immune system not working well enough or when it is not detecting cancerous cells, I hope that if we could stop this ‘off’ switch protein from working, then this could act to supercharge these cells again! These types of immune system based therapies, called immunotherapies, have far fewer side effects than the cancer therapies that are currently used. Early trials have shown these therapies to be very effective, so I strongly believe that immunotherapy will be the way forwards in treating so many diseases!

I get up pretty early as I’m definitely a morning person. I walk to work and spend the morning setting up some new experiments to try to study the protein than my PhD project focuses on. I mostly do this using different cell lines that I grow in incubators. I go for a little walk at lunch time if it’s a nice day, then in the afternoon I gather results from my day’s experiments and study them to see what new things they can tell me. I also read papers about experiments that other people have done, to get ideas and so that I can keep up with the world’s knowledge about my field of work. At the end of the week, I send my results to my boss so that we can discuss them before the next week.

Once work is finished, I walk home and do some exercise either by going for a run or riding my horse. Then I cook some dinner around 8/9pm, watch some Netflix, go to bed and do it all over again!