SPOTLIGHT ON PROFESSOR MENNA CLATWORTHY FMEDSCI
Affiliations:
Director, Cambridge Institute of Therapeutic Immunology and Infectious Disease (CITIID);
NIHR Research Professor and Professor of Translational Immunology, University of Cambridge;
Honorary Consultant Nephrologist, Cambridge University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust;
Associate Faculty Cellular Genetics, Wellcome Sanger Institute.
Research focus: The Clatworthy lab studies tissue immunity across organs and disease states, with an emphasis on humoral immunity. Our work ranges from experimental medicine studies in patients, in collaboration with industry partners, through to basic immunology studies, using murine models. The lab has a strong emphasis on integrating the use of primary human tissues into all studies, applying single cell genomic and transcriptomic technologies to these samples.
Menna Clatworthy
Recent advance from the lab: We have made some interesting findings on how humoral immunity (the part of the immune system that generates antibodies) functions in non-lymphoid organs, and how there are links between different organs like the gut and central nervous system (CNS). We found that B/plasma cells are educated in the intestine, but then traffic to the meninges (the membranes around the brain) and the brain itself (Fitzpatrick et al., Nature 2020). The meninges even have ‘lymph node-like’ structures that can support the generation of antibody responses (Fitzpatrick et al., Nature 2024). This has implications for how adaptive immune responses are generated in CNS infection and diseases.
Key challenge for the field: Historically, the field of immunology has relied heavily on mouse models, which can be useful, but doesn’t always translate well to human diseases. Attempts to relate findings to humans have largely focused on studying immune cells in blood, because it’s easy to access. So, one of the major challenges in immunology is studying tissue immunity in humans, in living subjects, because you need to sample internal organs to get the most useful, high dimensional data out of those samples.
Most exciting basic or clinical breakthrough in the past few years: Some of the most exciting breakthroughs in tissue immunity are technical advances – the widespread availability of single cell/nuclear RNA sequencing and spatial transcriptomic technologies that allow a much more comprehensive assessment of cell types and states within tissues, in a relatively unbiased way. The fact that we can now use some of these technologies on clinical samples, that are largely formalin fixed, opens up the possibility of re-classifying diseases based on molecular pathology. This will identify new treatment targets and, once these assays are cheap enough, will enable precision, personalised medicine.
Website: citiid.cam.ac.uk
Published July 2024