Breaking down barriers with ‘Sensory Science’

Breaking down barriers with ‘Sensory Science’

Stavroula Piliou, PhD student at the University of Cambridge 

18 Jun 24

Through our BSI Communication and Engagement Grant scheme, we recently supported a collaborative art project to make science more accessible to people who are blind or have low vision. Here, Stavroula Piliou, a PhD student involved in the project, explains how the resulting exhibit brought the complexities of the immune system to life in a range of tactile art pieces. 

---

In a society increasingly shaped by scientific progress, it is crucial that everyone – regardless of their background or ability – can take part in discussions about scientific inquiry. But science communication is so often limited to the written word and visual diagrams, in articles which can often be dense and inaccessible to a broad public audience. With our Sensory Science initiative, we aimed to break down some of these barriers.  

Under the leadership of Dr Erica Tandori, an artist with low vision from Monash University in Australia, and Professor Adrian Liston from the University of Cambridge, our team of PhD students collaborated with artists from Anglia Ruskin University to produce a suite of models designed to communicate the intricate and varied role of our immune system. We especially wanted to engage people who are blind or have low vision.

Collaboration enhances creativity 

By translating these complex scientific concepts into tactile multisensory art, we were able to bring to life the role of our immune system in four primary areas: neuroscience, autoimmunity, infection and cancer. The models, which appeal to a range of sensory experiences including touch, smell and hearing, were exhibited in March as part of the Cambridge Festival.

Resin brains crafted using cake moulds were used to illustrate the differences between a healthy brain, one affected by traumatic brain injury, and one impacted by multiple sclerosis, with the latter using a pet warming blanket to demonstrate inflammation in the central nervous system. 

Another model detailed the progression of cervical cancer and its metastasis, by depicting bacterial invasion into cells using sponges of different sizes, shapes and textures. Elsewhere, tactile posters explained the biology behind coeliac disease, and visitors to the exhibit even had the opportunity to hear their own brain activity, as Dr Stuart Favilla mapped brain waves into sound using innovative audio techniques.

A transformative experience 

The impact of the project on the immunologists involved was profound. The collaboration not only allowed us to articulate our research through multiple senses but also encouraged us to think creatively and outside the box. The experience sparked a deeper appreciation for inclusivity and community involvement in science, and demonstrated the importance of diverse perspectives that can enrich our understanding. 

The exhibit was very popular and gained significant public attention, including from BBC Look East, who reported on the initiative for their news programme. Most importantly, the general public gained a deeper understanding of the complexities of the immune system, and of its role in health and disease. 

What next for Sensory Science?

Following the success of the exhibit, we have received numerous requests to present our work at more science communication events, and some of the artworks have been incorporated into the medical student laboratories at the University of Cambridge. We are now planning to extend the impact of the exhibit by documenting and sharing our experiences in one or more scientific journals. The Sensory Science event was truly a reminder that the most effective innovation comes from the collective efforts of a diverse and inclusive community. 

Stavroula Piliou, PhD student at the University of Cambridge 

With thanks to Professor Adrian Liston, Dr Erica Tandori, Dr Stuart Favilla, Dr Julia Johnson, PhD students from the University of Cambridge, artists from Anglia Ruskin University and everyone else involved. 

Nurturing a positive research culture

Write-up on our recent article on positive research culture:

Nurturing a positive research culture

A Fellow of St Catharine’s is sharing practical advice on how to nurture a positive research culture within a laboratory and across an organisation. Professor Adrian Liston (2023), Professor of Pathology at the University of Cambridge, has co-authored two articles in response to a new emphasis on the importance of research culture in the UK’s funding landscape. The first article has just been published in the journal Immunology & Cell Biology.

He said, “The choices made by the leadership of a lab or an organisation – intentionally or more often than not unintentionally – can determine their research culture. There are cultures where researchers operate in competition (what I would call a toxic culture) or, with a bit of luck, you may encounter more positive research cultures, which tend to grow organically from the kindness and integrity of team members. Over successive generations, researchers have perpetuated cultures that were linked to past achievements. Unfortunately this hasn’t weeded out negative tendencies, because some researchers can succeed in a toxic environment in spite of – rather than due to – that research culture. We need to take a more deliberate approach to establishing positive research cultures within our organisations.”

Prof. Adrian Liston in his laboratory

The new emphasis on research culture was clear in June 2023 when the four higher education funding bodies in the UK announced that the Research Excellence Framework 2029 will have an expanded definition of research excellence to encompass people, culture and environment. This is on top of the £30 million already announced by UKRI’s Research England in 2022 to enable higher education providers to develop and initiate activities that will enhance research culture across the sector. 

Professor Liston explained, “There has been a recent sea change in attitudes at the highest levels of government and funding bodies, who now accept that research excellence is not only fuelled by the quantity and quality of outputs, but also by people, culture and environment. Personally, this change is very welcome and I am excited that we now have a fresh opportunity to rethink the research cultures that we are perpetuating, break bad habits and nurture positive ones.

“If we want to replicate the advances seen in other areas of scientific practice in progressing research culture, it is vital that we share best practice, examples and mechanisms that benefit our field. I know from my own experience that an individual early career researcher might only have worked in two or three different research cultures before deciding how they want their own lab to operate. I hope these two articles offer a toolkit for others to draw upon and inspire further discussion about different aspects of research culture so we can harness the collective experience of labs and organisations across the world.”

Team members in Prof. Liston's research group

The first article in the pair identifies the actionable areas where organisations can create and reinforce a positive research culture:

• Aligning staff recognition to the organisation’s missions;
• Designing the organisation structure around the mission and the people;
• Building a respectful environment;
• Openness and transparency; and
• Equality, diversity and inclusivity.

Each area is accompanied by frameworks, examples and/or other resources for readers to review and adapt according to their organisation’s needs. While Professor Liston and his co-author Professor Denise Fitzgerald work on similar research themes and have chosen to publish with Immunology & Cell Biology, their arguments are relevant for other academic disciplines. For example, their argument for organisations investing their energies at all levels of the ‘respect pyramid’ rather than relying entirely on punitive actions against toxic behaviours like bullying and harassment:

“The most visible interventions for nurturing a respectful environment (punitive actions against toxic behaviour) should also be the rarest, in the same way that the hospital is the last resort in creating a healthy environment. Underpinning this “emergency care” should be strategic positive interventions, rolled out when environments are suboptimal but before they reach a critical stage (analogous to treatment by a family doctor). More pervasive still should be the underlying fabric of the organisation, supporting a culture of respect, with individuals, in particular those in leadership positions, taking personal responsibility for their interactions.”

The respect pyramid provides the basis for building a respectful environment

Reference 

Adrian Liston and Denise C. Fitzgerald. Nurturing a positive research culture within your organisation. Immunology & Cell Biology. 2024; 1–10. doi: 10.1111/imcb.12795

Congratulations Stevi Piliou!

Congratulations to Stevi for winning the Lucy Cavendish College student writing prize for her research essay "Autoimmunity and neurological diseases – Creating a hope for the future"!

James Dooley: Transforming clinical treatment of neuroinflammatory conditions

Listen to Dr James Dooley get interviewed on The Big Experiment, about life, science and business:

Imagine being able to internalise the pharmaceutical factory into the human.

You could avoid the contamination risks and need for purification in biologic production.

In this episode I am joined by Dr James Dooley who is doing just this with his work at Aila Biotech. James and his team developed technology to drive the production of immune-regulating biologics at the exact site of disease. Through precise spatial and temporal control over biologic expression, Aila Biotech can prevent neuroinflammatory damage in brain injury.

James discusses his journey into science and how this work began. As well as the challenges that come with having to focus on the business, not just the science. He also reflects on what he might do differently if he were to start again.

“We really think we can have a dramatic effect on people's quality of life long term” – James Dooley

You’ll hear about:

01:50 – James’ journey into science

06:52 – James on drug delivery by adeno associated viruses

13:26 - What's the specificity of infection?

19:38 - Is there an invisible downside?

23:32 – James on the challenges of focusing on the business

28:47 – Will James be taking the therapy into the clinic?

36:25 – Would James do anything differently next time?

Harnessing our lived experience for science communication

Thanks to Nature Reviews Immunology for the chance to write about incorporating our lived experiences into effective science communication! A few tips on making your science communication effective and accessible to everyone:

First, find your passion! Reach out to the communities that you have connections to, and use a medium that you enjoy. You don't need to be an extravert to do public engagement! If you prefer to interact online, do so - there are audiences that want it. Content creation without any face-to-face interaction such as VirusFighter sci-comms too!

Second, harness your lived experience! Being slotted into a generic event that doesn't resonate with your life is a major turn-off. Using your identity in your comms builds the authenticity that audiences respond to, e.g. my efforts writing kids books, like Maya's Marvellous Medicine, are rooted in my life experience as a daddy.

Third, find collaborators with complementary skills. If you have a vision for an innovative outreach project, the talent is around you to make it happen! Those kids books needed artistic talent, via Sonia Agüera Gonzalez, our computer game needed coding expertise, via Simon Andrews, and our next project started after a chat in the pub revealed the talents of Yulia Lapko!

Finally, look to extend your reach! Taking a pro-active approach to inclusivity dramatically extends your impact. Look to reach the communities that are usually overlooked, such as Erica Tandori and her drive to make sciart accessible to the blind and low vision community through Sensory Science!

After the Smoke Clears: Scars on the Immune System

Check out this article written in The Scientist by Danielle Gerhard, on the epigenetic marks of smoking on the immune system. A few quote from me in the piece:

“There is no human immune system; there is everyone's individual immune system,” said Adrian Liston, an immunologist at the University of Cambridge who was not involved in the study. “We really need to study things at the scale that the group in Paris is studying if we want to understand what's going to be relevant to human health at a population level.” 

That's TV Cambridge interview

My interview on Sensory Science for That's TV Cambridge.

Key point: Science is for everyone, the benefits of science are for everyone, so science communication needs to be for everyone.

Story time at the Cambridge Festival

Learning about vaccines and primary immunodeficiency through story! Maya's Marvellous Medicine and Battle Robots of the Blood, from our lab! Also available to read online.

VirusFighter

VirusFighter at the Cambridge Festival! The kids had a blast, maybe try it yourself? Want to be in the driving seat as UK Prime Minister during the COVID pandemic? Make real-time decisions based on the information available and watch the pandemic play out. Or maybe you are keen to genetically-engineer a virus to prevent the UK being overrun by invasive wombats? Give it a shot!

Diversity in the Immune System

In case you are interested in my public seminar on "Diversity in the Immune System" for the Cambridge Festival today, I've uploaded the talk. Only shame is that it misses the hour of interesting and insightful questions from the audience afterwards!

I was also interviewed about this talk:

What fascinates you most about the immune system?

 

That is not a fair question! There are so many aspects of the immune system that are simply amazing. The immune system is our most powerful sensory system – capable of detecting even single molecules and responding to them. It is also incredibly powerful – given the right signals, millions of immune cells can be rapidly recruited from the blood into a tissue, where they can coordinate an attack powerful enough to liquify it. Yet this incredibly sensitive and enormously strong immune system almost never gets it wrong. It lies dormant until we get an infection, then usually responds with the minimal force needed to eradicate that infection. As immunologists we study the allergies, autoimmune disorders and inflammatory conditions that happen when the immune system slightly misjudges, but really it is amazing that our immune system messes up as rarely as it does!

Why are some people susceptible to certain immune diseases and others aren’t? 

Diversity lies at the heart of immunity. The best defence against pathogens is diversity in responses from person to person. You can think of the immune system having a dozen different default settings, which influence how we will respond to different pathogens. Each of these settings have trade-offs, they make us a little more susceptible to some immune diseases and a lot more resistant to others. It keeps pathogens on their toes, makes it harder for them to adapt to human immune systems, precisely because there is no single default immune response. From an evolutionary perspective the cost-benefit of all of these settings was probably fairly equivalent, but of course times have changed. Now days most people probably don’t appreciate the advantage that their increased susceptibility to pollen allergy may give in fighting off parasitic worm infections that they rarely get exposed to! 

 What causes this diversity in the immune system?

Good question! The single biggest effect is our environment. The air we breathe, the food we eat, the chemicals we are exposed to, the bacteria that live inside us. These environmental exposures are probably responsible for half of all of the variation in immune responses from one person to another – it is even more important than genetics. One of the ways we can see this is by looking at the immune systems of couples that live together. After couples having been living together for a few years their immune systems seems to converge in their settings, becoming much more similar to each other. This is almost certainly due to sharing all of those environmental factors. Did you know that you transfer as many as 80 million bacteria in a single kiss? So even the bacteria that live in our gut become more similar when we live together.

How about sex and gender? 

Sex and gender are perhaps less important than you might think. Together they are responsible for maybe 5% of the variation you see in the immune system from person to person. Similar to the level of difference you see in a smoker versus a non-smoker. The most interesting aspect about this effect is that we really don’t know how much of the effect is sex and how much is gender. Biological sex certainly can modify our immune system, but gender is greatly under-estimated. A simple example of hidden gender effects is bladder cancer. 3 out of 4 bladder cancer patients are men, which is often described as a sex bias. However the underlying cause of most of these bladder cancers are exposures to chemicals such as aniline dyes, which were previously used in factories. So the high risk of bladder cancer in men is not due to biological differences between men and women, but rather due to the gendered segregation of jobs. The immune system is highly responsive to environmental exposures, and is certainly modified by gendered exposures (smoking, workplace pollutants, personal chemical exposures, etc). So how much of the “sex effect” is actually due to gender? The answer will vary a lot, because gender roles and exposures are constantly changing.

Is it possible to reprogramme someone’s immune system? 

For sure. Quit smoking, take up exercise, change your diet – all of these will reprogramme your immune system. The problem is just that we have very limited data on how these link back to what we really care about – our susceptibility to immune diseases. Ignore any claims about “immune boosting” on herbal supplements or “health” food products; the claims have no scientific basis, and the immune system does not work so simply. It is fair to say that certain foods and gut bacteria will likely push the immune system in one direction or another, and that these changes may be beneficial for different immune diseases. At some point in the (hopefully close) future, we may be able to advise simple diet changes to nudge someone back to health. Right now, though, anyone making claims like this is probably selling snake oil!

What are you working on at the moment?   

The one really reliable way to reprogramme your immune system is through vaccination! A vaccine gives your immune system a sneak peak to a future pathogen, letting it train up before the infection hits. Proven protection from that one infection, leaving the rest of the immune system dormant. There is incredible science behind vaccines; they are probably the single most consequential discovery in the history of medicine. But there is certainly room for improvement – some vaccines are great, others are merely good, and some populations (such as older people) don’t get all of the protection that we want them to have. So our work looking forward is to understand the diversity of immune responses to vaccines. We want to see if we can take the lessons from the people who respond to vaccines really well and use that information to improve the quality of vaccines for everyone else.