News

Eve Stalker, a PhD student in the Willis Lab, and Dr Miriam Cipullo, a Postdoctoral Fellow joint between AstraZeneca and the MacFarlane Lab at the MRC Toxicology Unit were awarded prizes at the joint BTS-BPS Meeting ‘Toxicology in a New Era of Pharmacology’. The one-day conference brought together experts across pharmacology and toxicology to discu…

Researchers in the MacFarlane lab at the MRC Toxicology Unit have identified that a protein called TAp73 controls mitochondrial function in ciliated cells that line our airways. Ciliated cells are essential to clear mucus from our airways to maintain lung function. As this process is defective in diseases such as Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disea…

Our Unit Director Prof Anne Willis has been awarded the prestigious John Barnes Prize Award from the British Toxicology Society. Prof Willis leads a research group investigating the role of post-transcriptional control in response to toxic injury with a focus on RNA-binding proteins, regulatory RNA motifs and tRNAs and how this impacts on therapeut…

Trials of a cancer 'vaccine' have begun. The vaccine is based on the same mRNA technology as the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccines. As part of this latest episode of BBC Radio 4's Inside Health programme, James Gallagher visits the Unit and speaks to Prof Anne Willis and Dr James Thaventhiran about how the vaccine is personalised to target the uniq…

From 8th-12th July 2024, we welcomed budding young scientists to the Unit to try out their lab skills side-by-side with our researchers as part of the Aspiring Scientists Training Programme (ASTP) where Sixth Form students can gain invaluable work experience.During the week, the students spent a significant amount of time with their lab hosts gaini…

From snowflakes and sunflowers, to butterflies and humans, symmetry is abundant throughout nature. There is also an elegant symmetry to the double helix structure of DNA – the blueprint of life. Yet, many of the DNA’s functions are asymmetrical: only one strand is needed for certain cellular processes, and some key proteins prefer one strand over t…

Researchers at the MRC Toxicology Unit have developed a new mouse model for tracking the behaviour of immune cells once an immune response is triggered. This could help scientists to understand how our immune system responds to different insults in more detail to develop new and improved immune therapies.Our body triggers an immune response when it…

The conference marked the inaugural event of the UK Proteostasis Network, an initiative launched by the Babraham Institute and shaped by Network Coordinators: Ritwick Sawarkar from the MRC Toxicology Unit, Della David and Oliver Florey at the Babraham Institute, and Laura Itzhaki at the University of Cambridge.

David O'Loughlin, PhD student in the MacFarlane lab at the MRC Toxicology Unit, has been awarded the 2024 Mary Amdur Student Award by the Society of Toxicology (SOT) at their Annual Meeting in Salt Lake City, Utah.The prize, named in honour of a pioneer in air pollution toxicology who overcame gender, political and scientific barriers to assert the…

Our gut microbiome is home to a diverse mix of microorganisms that are delicately balanced to preserve many aspects of our health including digestion, immunity and even our mental wellbeing. There are known factors that can impact our microscopic companions such as diet, lifestyle, antibiotic use and environmental exposures. However, a new report f…

Researchers from the Unit participated in this year's Norwich Science Festival on 24th February. It was the first time that the Unit has taken part in this event sharing our research to a wider audience.We set up our temporary tattoo parlour in The Forum in Norwich as part of our Tattoo My Science activity. We chatted to over 400 visitors about tox…

Towards the end of 2023, six of our researchers took part in the Talking Together programme hosted by Cambridgeshire Older People's Enterprise (COPE).Talking Together is a unique initiative that was started during the pandemic to combat isolation in the local community by bringing older adults together for stimulating telephone-based conversations …

We all go through times when we are not on track, feeling a little blue and out of our usual form. These are the times when we need a little warmth from those close to us – some extra support, a helping hand. The same goes for the proteins in our cells.Proteins are the workhorses in our cells and have numerous tasks to complete every day just to ke…

Work published by Prof Anne Willis and Dr James Thaventhiran, alongside collaborators in Kent, Oxford and Liverpool, describing how mRNA therapeutics may cause an unintended immune response and need fine-tuning for the future was reported across multiple national and international media outlets.You can read the Unit's news article and/or the paper,…

Researchers from the Willis and Thaventhiran labs have discovered that misreading of therapeutic mRNAs by the cell’s decoding machinery can cause an unintended immune response in the body. They have identified the sequence within the mRNA that causes this to occur and found a way to prevent ‘off-target’ immune responses to enable the safer design o…