Submitted by Rachel Fellows on Fri, 09/05/2025 - 12:53
Yesterday at the British Toxicology Society Congress, our Unit Director Professor Anne Willis delivered the John Barnes Prize lecture, focusing on mechanistic toxicology to improve human health.
This award was established in memory of Dr John Barnes, who was the Director from the establishment of MRC Toxicology Unit in 1947 until 1975. Dr Barnes was a pioneering toxicologist who worked on the mode of action of a wide range of compounds, including making a worldwide survey of the toxicity of pesticides for the World Health Organisation. He was also supportive of young scientists, upholding a high quality of science whilst also encouraging an excellent research culture.
Every two years the British Toxicology Society awards the John Barnes Prize to a distinguished leader in the profession of Toxicology and Safety Science. The winners are recognised for their significant scientific contributions in research, teaching, safety assessment and/or regulation. The first prize was awarded just four years after Barnes's death, to Prof Norman Aldridge in 1979. Previous winners of the prize now constitute an impressive list of distinguished scientists, including Sir Alec Jeffreys, Professor Bruce Ames and Professor Ian Kimber OBE.
Professor Willis obtained her PhD from the University of London, working on DNA repair with Dr Tomas Lindahl. She then trained with Professor Richard Perham in the Department of Biochemistry at Cambridge University, before setting up her own independent group at the University of Leicester. Anne was the Director of Cancer Research Nottingham and Chair of Cancer Cell Biology, before taking up the position of Director of the MRC Toxicology Unit in 2010. Since then, she has been appointed member of EMBO in 2014, and awarded an OBE for services to biomedical sciences and supporting the careers of women scientists in 2015. She was appointed as a Fellow of the British Toxicology Society in 2018.
Over her career, Professor Willis and her group has worked on various aspects of post-transcriptional control of gene expression. Anne’s group at the Unit aims to understand the role of post-transcriptional control in response to toxic injury with a focus on RNA-binding proteins, regulatory RNA motifs and tRNAs. She uses a mechanistic approach to develop predictive adverse outcome models that can be shared with our industrial partners. Uncovering the “off target” effects of new modalities such as therapeutic RNAs and understanding how to prevent them is a key aspect of her research and was at the centre of a recent paper in Nature.
At the John Barnes Award Lecture this week, Anne discussed the wide ranging impact of the toxicology studies she has led over the course of her career, highlighting how important mechanistic understanding is within the safety science field. Anne also highlighted the importance of collaboration and team science. Congratulations to Professor Willis for this amazing achievement!
