by Samuel White | 11th September 2023
Cellular plasticity, the ability of a cell to adopt alternative fates or acquire new identities, is relevant to diverse fields, including developmental and stem cell biology, regenerative medicine. Insights into these mechanisms could provide us with tools for...
by Samuel White | 11th September 2023
Type 2 Diabetes (T2D) and obesity-related traits are global epidemics. In the UK alone, ~4 million people are living with diabetes and 10% of the NHS budget is spent on diabetes. A limitation to early detection and treatment of T2D is its diverse clinical presentation...
by Samuel White | 11th September 2023
The lymphatic network and lymph nodes act as sentinels of the immune system. Lymphatic vessels continually deliver tissue-derived signals for lymph node constituents to assess and initiate an immune response when needed. This system, however may be hijacked by tumours...
by Samuel White | 11th September 2023
The importance of cell-to-cell communication mediated by extracellular vesicles (EV) is gaining increasing attention. In patients with cancer, Tumour-derived EV can be readily detected, these can contain micro and other RNAs in addition to various chemokines and...
by Samuel White | 11th September 2023
X chromosome inactivation (XCI) occurs early during development in female embryos, ensuring the transcriptional silencing of one of two X chromosomes in somatic cells. Once established, silencing is maintained through subsequent cell divisions, and the inactive X (Xi)...
by Samuel White | 11th September 2023
One of the first points of contact of pathogenic coronaviruses during infection is the alveolar epithelium of the lung. A consequence of infection of these cells is a dysregulated inflammatory response typified by hyper-production of inflammatory mediators that leads...
by Samuel White | 11th September 2023
Myelodysplastic syndromes and acute myeloid leukaemia (MDS/AML) are closely related blood cancers. A subtype of MDS/AML with DNA-damage repair pathway (DDRp) gene mutations (especially TP53) and complex aneuploidal karyotype (CK-MDS/AML) is incurable with median...
by Samuel White | 11th September 2023
Platelets are requisite for inflammation and host responses to infections. Platelets represent novel cellular targets from which we can control diseases such as asthma and COPD, or infections such bacterial or viral induced Pneumonia or COVID-19, for which society...
by Samuel White | 11th September 2023
Immune checkpoint inhibition (CPI) has revolutionised the landscape in cancer treatment. However, there are two major limitations to these treatments: firstly, and due to their immune-stimulatory nature, they may cause severe toxicity that mimics autoimmune diseases;...
by Samuel White | 11th September 2023
Asthma is a major health problem affecting millions of people globally. This disease is characterised by acute or chronic lung inflammation, epithelial cell activation and tissue remodelling/fibrosis. Immune cells trigger changes in the lung epithelium leading to loss...
by Samuel White | 11th September 2023
Even when viral loads are suppressed by antiretroviral therapy in an infected individual, a small proportion of circulating CD4+ T cells harbour transcriptionally silent Human Immunodeficiency Virus type-1. This latent reservoir can be ‘re-awoken’ by inflammatory...
by Samuel White | 11th September 2023
Head and neck cancers (HNC) are oral squamous cell carcinomas (OSCC) that develop in fields premalignant mucosa, histologically diagnosed as oral epithelial dysplasia (OED). Chronic infection is associated with OED and OSCC but the mechanisms driving these...
