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Sunday, December 22, 2019 at 11:32PM 
Congratulations to Dr Kailash Singh and Dr Emanuela Pasciuto, who both had new babies in the past weeks. Lab babies number 12 and 13, respectively!
Liston lab Sunday, December 1, 2019 at 9:51AM 
Saturday, October 26, 2019 at 1:01PM Are you interested in a PhD in neuroimmunology? Want to find out how to harness the power of the immune system to cure traumatic brain injury? Check out our PhD position here. It is a rare chance to join a fantastic international team, and to learn to do high level science in a supportive and caring environment.
A successful candidate will be:
The successful candidate does not need:
If you are submitting an application, consider a co-application to a Cambridge College, such as Peterhouse.
Saturday, August 31, 2019 at 10:03AM 
A big farewell to Julian Behr. Julian has been an amazing Masters student this year. Our first Babraham alumni is now off to start his PhD with Maries van den Broek at the University of Zurich. Expect great things!
Liston lab Monday, August 12, 2019 at 1:11PM by Becky Allen
New group leaders bring new skills, new expertise and new perspectives, and 2018 saw three new group leaders join the Institute’s Immunology programme. Professor Adrian Liston, Dr Claudia Ribeiro de Almeida and Dr Sarah Ross talk about their research, their ambitions and what makes the Institute such a special place to work.
They come from VIB in Belgium, Oxford’s Proudfoot lab and the University of Dundee, they focus on different areas of immunology and bring new interests and expertise, but Professor Adrian Liston, Dr Claudia Ribeiro de Almeida and Dr Sarah Ross are all hugely excited to have recently joined the Institute.
Liston, already an established group leader, works on the specialist population of immune cells known as CD4T cells. These cells effectively coordinate and ‘turbo charge’ our immune response. They are also the cells that are targeted by HIV, explaining why the disease causes immune system suppression and illustrating how crucial CD4T cells are to our overall health.
At VIB, Liston specialised in translational immunology, understanding and then developing ways to treat children with rare immune diseases. “These diseases are incredibly severe, but once you understand them mechanistically you can work out ways to treat them,” he explains. “It was very rewarding because these kids that would otherwise often die can go on to lead long, healthy lives once you’ve found out what’s wrong and how to fix it.”
At the Institute, Liston wants to answer three key questions: how the millions of CD4T cells in our bodies communicate and cooperate; how they switch between a ramping up and damping down cell type; and what they do in our tissues. Understanding how these cells modulate our immune system means that they can potentially be used as a tool to fine tune the immune system to help overcome age-related decline.
With its world-leading Immunology programme and cutting-edge facilities the Institute is a great fit for Liston’s ambitions. But what sets the Institute apart is how it nurtures scientific innovation and champions equality and inclusion.
“Great research requires fantastic people who think as differently as possible, which means having an environment that celebrates equality and inclusion. The Institute has a great reputation for this internationally – it’s setting the gold standard for equality and inclusion. You can feel the difference here,” says Liston. “The Institute provides an environment where you’re going to be stimulated and have the chance to explore the limits of your imagination.”
Ribeiro de Almeida and Ross both believe the Institute’s culture will help them build their first research groups. “It’s a very friendly, supportive environment. Everyone is ready to help with time and feedback – they want you to succeed and that’s really special,” says Ross.
Ribeiro de Almeida’s work centres on B lymphocytes and the rare ability they have to rearrange antibody genes by cutting and pasting DNA in order to fight the plethora of pathogens to which we are exposed. “I’m interested in understanding how this mechanism is regulated throughout cell development,” she explains. “It’s a fundamental question, because mistakes in this process can result in leukaemia and lymphoma. To understand these diseases and wider age-related immune dysfunction it’s important to understand how these molecular mechanisms are regulated.”
As a postdoc in Oxford, she worked in a lab that studied gene expression rather than B cells, so she brings a more molecular approach to the programme. She also discovered an RNA-binding protein that plays an important part in B lymphocytes’ cut and paste process, something she’s keen to follow up: “The research I want to do next is to identify which proteins are implicated in this mechanism of gene rearrangement and how they modulate B cell responses.”
Ross specialises in T lymphocytes and the impact that hypoxia – or low levels of oxygen – has on the way they work. Because T cells commonly encounter hypoxic environments, they can adapt to low oxygen environments by changing the proteins they express. While this helps them survive, it can also make them less effective killers of disease cells.
“I want to understand how oxygen regulates T cells from a signalling and gene expression perspective,” she explains. “If we could identify factors that we could target therapeutically to overcome the effects of low oxygen and boost the ability of T cells to perform their protective function, that would be amazing.”
We know that as we age, our immune system becomes less effective and poorer oxygenation is also connected with ageing, so what Ross discovers about hypoxia could have important implications, both for our understanding of the ageing immune system and in making immunotherapies more successful.
The arrival of all three is an exciting opportunity for the Institute, the Immunology programme and its three new group leaders. “It’s amazing – I’m still pinching myself,” Ross concludes. “It’s great to be able to make new plans and work out how to turn them into reality utilising the know-how and the facilities we have access to here. And it’s exciting to be here because my plans cover all three programmes – Immunology, Signalling and Epigenetics – adding my own to all the expertise here makes it hugely exciting.”
Liston lab Friday, May 17, 2019 at 8:54AM 
Congratulations to Dr Wenson Karunakaran!
It was tough competition for the sixth Golden Pipette at the Cambridge-Leuven joint lab retreat. The final prize had to go to Dr Karunakaran for his work on brain CD4 T cells.
Many neuroscientists assume there are no CD4 T cells inside the healthy brain, but there are in fact around 5000 per gram of brain tissue. How do we know? Wenson imaged and counted them, one by one.
That is what it takes to win the Golden Pipette.
Monday, May 6, 2019 at 11:03AM A revolution in medicine is coming.
It could aid the diagnosis of diseases, guide the way patients are treated and inform the discovery of new therapies.
Immune profiling seeks to explain how our body’s own defences are affected by and are responding to disease.
At the Babraham Institute, Professor Adrian Liston is working on the translation of this technique from the laboratory to the clinic.
“The immune profile is much more powerful than genomic data, but it’s much easier to get genomic data,” he tells the Cambridge Independent. “You can take blood, send it overnight and get it sequenced off-site. We are not at that stage with immune system data.
“But the more we know about different diseases, the more we realise there are inflammatory, or immune-mediated, components.
“It can be a revolution in medicine. Once the infrastructure is set up and hospitals are doing the analysis routinely, we will see an explosion in utility. Right now, it’s a research tool only.”
Read the full article at the Cambridge Independent
Liston lab, immunology Wednesday, March 13, 2019 at 10:55AM Profiling the immune system in paediatric arthritis patients offers hope for improved diagnosis and treatment
A team of scientists from VIB and KU Leuven has developed a machine learning algorithm that identifies children with juvenile arthritis with almost 90% accuracy from a simple blood test. The new findings, published this week in Annals of the Rheumatic Diseases, pave the way for the use of machine learning to improve diagnosis and to predict which juvenile arthritis patients may respond best to different treatment options. The work was led by Professor Adrian Liston, a group leader at the Babraham Institute in Cambridge, UK and at VIB and KU Leuven in Leuven, Belgium.
Juvenile idiopathic arthritis is the most common rheumatic disease in children, but it presents in many different severities and forms. This diversity makes clinical assessment and patient classification difficult.
A team of researchers at Belgian research organisations VIB, KU Leuven and UZ Leuven undertook a detailed biological characterisation of the immune system of hundreds of children with and without juvenile arthritis to help the diagnosis or treatment decisions for this disease.
“Essentially, we took blood samples from more than 100 children, two thirds of whom had childhood arthritis,” explains Erika Van Nieuwenhove (VIB-KU Leuven), and first author of the study. “We analysed their immune system at a greater level of detail than was ever done before for this disease, and simply using this data we then used machine learning to see if we could tell which children had arthritis.”
The results were quite remarkable: the algorithm was about 90% accurate at identifying the children with the disease. “Using only information on the immune system, and no clinical data at all, we could design a machine learning algorithm that was about 90% accurate at spotting which kids had arthritis,” says Professor Adrian Liston (Babraham Institute, Cambridge, UK and VIB-KU Leuven). “This result is a proof-of-principle demonstration that immune phenotyping combined with machine learning holds huge potential to diagnose disease. Similar approaches could be applied to improve patient selection for treatments and clinical trials.”
The researchers are hopeful about the impact of this research in improving patient outcomes. “The tool needs further validation but otherwise there are no scientific barriers to this approach being quickly translated to the clinic,” comments Professor Carine Wouters (UZ Leuven), who was the clinical lead for this study. “Down the line, we could use this kind of detailed classification information—and machine learning analysis—to identify which patients will respond best to specific treatment options.”
Liston lab, Medicine, immunology Tuesday, February 26, 2019 at 10:31AM Our study on myeloproliferative disorder is on the front cover of Blood
Liston lab 
