The IRIS Initiative investigates changes in invasive disease in 26 countries during the COVID-19 pandemic. Prof Brueggemann has worked at the University of Oxford since 2000 across four different departments and two colleges, initially as a DPhil student and then progressing through several research fellowships and teaching posts. She also worked at Imperial College London for two years and joined her current Oxford department and the Big Data Institute in 2019. Prof Brueggemann currently sits on a vaccines and antimicrobial resistance advisory group at the World Health Organisation and is the secretary of the ISPPD scientific society. The Brueggemann research group analyses thousands of bacterial genomes to better understand diseases like meningitis and pneumonia, and the impact of vaccination and antimicrobial resistance. Current research projects are focused on IRIS, a large international consortium of laboratories investigating the impact of COVID-19 on bacterial invasive disease; bacteriocin peptides that might have potential as novel antimicrobials; bacteriophages and pneumococcal disease; and the diagnosis of meningitis in Africa. A central component of the research includes making genomic data and analysis tools freely accessible to the international community through a large suite of databases in PubMLST.
Meredith Ashby has been with Pacific Biosciences since 2009, initially working in R&D on both sequencing integration and bioinformatics application development before joining the marketing team to work on an array of research areas including human population genomics, cancer research, immunology, and microbiology. She is now focused on facilitating the use of PacBio long read sequencing to solve the unmet needs of scientists seeking to understand the incredibly diverse range of microbes that live in, on and around us and the complex systems we depend on. She has been actively engaged in PacBio’s response to the global COVID-19 pandemic, including the forthcoming release of a SARS-CoV-2 sequencing kit.
Dr. Francesco Boccellato studied at “Sapienza” University of Rome. Since he was a student he was interested in the impact of pathogens in causing cancer in humans. During his PhD in Rome he studied the role of the Epstein Barr virus (EBV) in deregulating microRNAs in diffuse large B cell lymphomas. After his PhD, Francesco moved to Berlin, at the Max Planck Institute for Infection Biology, were he started being interested in the causality of bacterial infection in human cancers. To study the impact of infection on healthy epithelial barriers Francesco invented a new cultivation systems for healthy epithelial cells called the mucosoids. The mucosoids are monolayer of polarised epithelial cells that recapitulate all the functions of an epithelial barrier in the body, including mucus production. Francesco has recently started his independent group in the University of Oxford (UK), at the Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research. The forefront of the gastrointestinal mucosa consists mainly of a continuous polarised epithelial monolayer, protected by mucus. This strong defence barrier can be colonized by pathogens arousing a chronic inflammatory state. This exceptional colonization ability is associated with an increased risk of developing adenocarcinomas at the sites of infection. We have regenerated organoids and we have developed a new functional epithelial monolayer culture called “mucosoids”. The mucosoids are human multi-lineage stem-cell based in-vitro equivalent of a real mucosa. They mimic the function of a homeostatic epithelial barrier including accumulation of mucus on the apical side. Use of human mucosoid cultures reveals novel insight into epithelial homeostasis and response to bacterial infection.
Daniel Fordham has been working at Oxford Nanopore Technologies since 2010. Around 8 of those years were within the Applications and the Advance Research teams. Whilst a member of these teams, Dan worked on the development of many of the early kits, along with early basic research on a variety of projects. Around 2 years ago, Dan moved into the Market Development team to add his deep technical knowledge to the commercial department focussing on large scale sequencing consortia, methylation and epigenetics, and, conservation genomics.
Julian Knight is Professor of Genomic Medicine at the University of Oxford, Director of the Doctoral Training Programme in Genomic Medicine and Statistics, and a Fellow and Tutor in Medicine at Merton College. Since 2005 he has worked at the Wellcome Centre for Human Genetics as a Principal Investigator and as an Honorary Consultant Physician at the Oxford University Hospitals NHS Trust in internal medicine. He is also Research Director of the Central and South Genomic Medicine Services Alliance. His research investigates the genomics of immunity and how this can determine our individual response to infections such as sepsis and development of autoimmunity.