Incredibly pleased to have been awarded a @BIOREMEnet Starter Grant! I'll be visiting the Statistical Biophysics lab at École Normale Supérieure in Paris to learn about probabilistic modelling of T cell receptor generation. Can't wait!

Fantastic to have our very own @ChestClinicRVI superhero @KarenMarshall02 receive the @BTSrespiratory meritorious service award today. This couldn’t be more deserved, nor go to a better person. Massive congrats Karen!🤩🎖️ 🫁🫁 #BTSWinter2024 #RespIsBest @ARNS_UK @NewcastleHosps

The NIVO score was validated in patients with known airflow obstruction on spirometry. This study shows it has good discrimination (AUROC 0.724) in patients clinically treated for AECOPD but without prior spirometry confirming the diagnosis.  https://t.co/aHKGEy1yKy

Some fantastic candidates running for ERS Assembly 3 early career rep... 👀

@RichardCHD @FunstonWendy @RostronTony @NIHRresearch Thanks also to Li Song for developing some fantastic bioinformatic tools that are so intuitive that someone like me can use them! https://t.co/5CJXjYNNRB

Many many thanks to co-authors @RichardCHD, @FunstonWendy, @RostronTony and John Simpson for very valuable expertise. Thanks also to @NIHRresearch for support. Looking forward to seeing what Reviewer 2 makes of this!

We think we have a way to identify the important T cells in HP. We also think we can show that you don't need to check very many patients before you find pairs who share important T cell receptors (and HLA alleles). That means our idea to deduce antigens could actually work. 9/

If you can tell which of a person's T cells are HP-related and you find identical T cells to those in another patient with HP, you can surmise that they have the same antigen. If Patient A's HP is idiopathic but Patient B races pigeons, then you've cracked Patient A's case. 8/

A phenomenon called T cell receptor sharing could help us. While any one person's naïve T cell receptors are incredibly diverse, biases in how the diversity arises mean that multiple people can often respond to the same antigen with T cells bearing identical receptors. 7/

Assuming you can even find which of a patient's T cells are responding to the HP antigen, it's next to impossible to reverse engineer them to figure out the antigen from the T cell receptor shape. 6/

We wondered if we could profile the pulmonary T cell response to help us identify antigens. That sounds very silly to people who know a lot about T cell immunity, but thankfully we had no such problems. 5/

The best treatment currently available for the condition is keeping the patient away from the antigen. An identifiable HP antigen is associated with better disease outcomes, but we don't have many better ways to find antigens than careful history taking. 4/

Sometimes the trigger is obvious: people who race pigeons know to watch out for symptoms, for instance, because bloom from pigeon feathers can be an HP antigen. In over half of patients, however, we never find out what the cause is. 3/

HP is characterised by a T cell-rich alveolitis (and sometimes co-existent lung fibrosis) in response to inhaled exposures that might be harmless in other people. 2/

Pleased to have this up on bioRxiv! It was borne of my obsession with the idea of immune profiling to identify antigens in hypersensitivity pneumonitis (HP), and while this hasn't yet been peer reviewed we think we can prove it is feasible. 1/ https://t.co/YbQ0IKLKpV

Proud moment :D. I think this is the first study that uses both TRUST4 (for TCR assembly) and T1K (for HLA genotyping).

T cell receptor sharing in hypersensitivity pneumonitis https://t.co/lOwBp4X0L3 #biorxiv_immuno

91% + 82% = 173%

Samukonga with a National Record and a Bronze medal 🥉 GET IN Zambia 🇿🇲

A huge united community response in Newcastle’s West End against the far right. ✊🏽