Abstract

Friday 6 February, 13:00 – 14:00

Speaker: Professor Clare Bryant, Departments of Medicine and Veterinary Medicine, University of Cambridge

Talk Title: Pattern Recognition Receptor signalling in infection and sterile inflammation

Biography: Clare Bryant is Professor of Innate Immunity at the Departments of Medicine and Veterinary Medicine in the University of Cambridge. She studies innate immune cell signalling in response to Pathogen Associated Molecular Pattern Receptor (PRR) activation during bacterial infection using cutting edge multi-disciplinary approaches (collaborating with mathematicians, physicists, physical chemists and structural biologists) to answer fundamental questions about host-pathogen interactions and how to modify them therapeutically. She also applies these innovative approaches to study PRR -induced inflammatory signalling in chronic diseases of humans and animals. In particularly her work using super resolution and single molecule fluorescent imaging approaches to study Toll-like receptor and NOD -like receptor signalling within cells have revealed novel mechanisms in how these receptors signal. She has been on secondments in Genentech and GSK , has extensive collaborations with many pharmaceutical companies, is on the scientific advisory board of several biotech companies, has a drug discovery project with Apollo Therapeutics and helped found the natural product company Polypharmakos. During the COVID -19 pandemic she founded, and still runs, the Inflammazoom international on line seminar series. She was elected as a Fellow of the British Pharmacology Society (2018), Fellow of the American Academy of Microbiology (2023), The Learned Society of Wales (2023) and the Academy of Medical Sciences (2025).