Contact information
Kathryn Smith
kathryn.smith@ndm.ox.ac.uk
Magdalen College, University of Oxford
Henry Wellcome Building for Molecular Physiology
Colleges
Richard Cornall
FRCP, FMedSci
Nuffield Professor of Clinical Medicine and Head of Department
- Professor of Immunology
- MRC Investigator
Our aim is to understand how the immune system is formed and regulated and the causes of autoimmunity, particularly the systemic autoimmune diseases, and the development and selection of B cells. Adverse immunological reactions to self and foreign antigens that lead to autoimmune or inflammatory disease place a major economic and social burden on world health and individual quality of life. We are also interested in how people differ in their inherited susceptibility to these diseases and why these differences are sustained in human populations by natural selection. Advances in this area will have a large and impact on the management of human disease.
Our strategy involves research programmes in basic biology and in clinical medicine. In the first, we use transgenic models to investigate how lymphocytes function in health and in human disease and how our genes encode susceptibility to autoimmunity and immunodeficiency. In the second, which is a collaboration with Professor Simon Davis, we are developing ways to change the function of lymphocytes, turning them on in cancer and off during inflammation or autoimmunity.