Immunology Seminar Series

June 13th at 14:00 – 15:00 (Finland time)
Virtual event

Fiona Powrie, University of Oxford: Translating immunology into new therapies for Inflammatory Bowel Disease

Host: Riitta Lahesmaa (rilahes@utu.fi )
Registration latest June 12th at https://link.webropolsurveys.com/S/D08980F98591B2B7

Immunology seminar series is jointly organised by the Finnish Society for Immunology, InFLAMES Flagship and Turku Bioscience. For further information contact Anne Lahdenperä (ankahy@utu.fi) or Riitta Lahesmaa (rilahes@utu.fi), University of Turku.

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Professor Dame Fiona Powrie is Director of the Kennedy Institute of Rheumatology, University of Oxford, a Fellow of the Royal Society and the Academy of Medical Sciences and a Governor of the Wellcome Trust.

She gained a PhD in immunology at the University of Oxford and then moved to the DNAX Research Institute in Palo Alto, before returning to Oxford in 1996 as a Wellcome Trust Senior Research Fellow. Prior to her appointment to the Kennedy Institute, Fiona Powrie was the Sidney Truelove Professor of Gastroenterology and Head of the Translational Gastroenterology Unit, Oxford (2009- 2014).

Her research examines the relationship between the intestinal microbiome and the host immune system and how this mutualistic relationship breaks down in inflammatory bowel disease, arthritis and cancer.

Fiona Powrie has received numerous prestigious prizes and awards, including the Louis Jeantet Prize for Medicine in 2012. She was elected an international member of the National Academy of Sciences in 2020 and was appointed Deputy Chair of the Wellcome Board of Governors and Dame Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire (DBE), for services to Medical Science, in 2022.

Selected publications:

Friedrich M, Pohin M, Jackson MA, Korsunsky I, Bullers SJ, Rue-Albrecht K, Christoforidou Z, Sathananthan D, Thomas T, Ravindran R, Tandon R, Peres RS, Sharpe H, Wei K, Watts GFM, Mann EH, Geremia A, Attar M; Oxford IBD Cohort Investigators; Roche Fibroblast Network Consortium, McCuaig S, Thomas L, Collantes E, Uhlig HH, Sansom SN, Easton A, Raychaudhuri S, Travis SP, Powrie FM. IL-1-driven stromal-neutrophil interactions define a subset of patients with inflammatory bowel disease that does not respond to therapies. Nat Med. 2021 Nov;27(11):1970-1981

Aschenbrenner D, Quaranta M, Banerjee S, Ilott N, Jansen J, Steere B, Chen YH, Ho S, Cox K, Arancibia-Cárcamo CV, Coles M, Gaffney E, Travis SP, Denson L, Kugathasan S, Schmitz J, Powrie F, Sansom SN, Uhlig HH. Deconvolution of monocyte responses in inflammatory bowel disease reveals an IL-1 cytokine network that regulates IL-23 in genetic and acquired IL-10 resistance. Gut. 2021 Jun;70(6):1023-1036

Ryzhakov G, West NR, Franchini F, Clare S, Ilott NE, Sansom, SN, Bullers SJ, Pearson C, Costain A, Vaughan-Jackson A, Goettel JA, Ermann J, Horwitz BH, Buti L, Lu X, Mukhopadhyay S, Snapper SB, Powrie F. 2018 Alpha kinase 1 controls intestinal inflammation by suppressing the IL-12/Th1 axis. Nat Commun 9(1):3797

Hegazy AN, West NR, Stubbington MJT, Wendt E, Suijker KIM, Datsi A, This S, Danne C, Campion S, Duncan SH, Owens BMJ, Uhlig HH, McMichael A, Oxford IBDCI, Bergthaler A, Teichmann SA, Keshav S, Powrie F. 2017. Circulating and Tissue-Resident CD4(+) T Cells With Reactivity to Intestinal Microbiota Are Abundant in Healthy Individuals and Function Is Altered During Inflammation. Gastroenterology 153: 1320-37 e16