Congratulations to Jasmine Hughes!

Congratulations to Jasmine Hughes for her Cook Society Award for dedicating herself to social justice, equality and strengthening the campus community, during her time at Duke University! I'm glad to say she is keeping up the focus during her PhD here at the University of Cambridge!

A looming threat to scientific publication

You can't argue with Professor John Tregoning, of Imperial College: these graphics are "objectively funny". 

But beyond the snickering, there is a reason why the biomedical science community is in uproar over this paper. 

It is a failure of peer review that this article was ever published in a scientific journal. Scientific articles are meant to be peer reviewed, precisely to catch garbage articles like this. No system is ever 100% perfect, and science is a rapidly-moving self-correcting ecosystem, but this is just so... prominant... a mistake, how did it happen?

To understand, it is important to recognise that scientists have been aware of the short-comings of peer review for years (and there are many!). The scientific publishing system is flawed: it is hard to find anyone that would argue against that. Unfortunately many of the "solutions" have made the problem worse.

"Open access publishing" opened up science to the world. Rather than "pay to read", scientists "pay to publish". On the plus side, the public can access scientific articles cost-free. On the down-side, it provided a market for pseudo-scientific journals, "predatory journals" to open up and accept any "scientific" article that someone is willing to pay to publish. One of the leading journals in the "open access" movement was "Frontiers". They genuinely transformed the style of peer review, making it rapid, interactive and very, very scaleable. Unfortunately the utopian vision of the journal clashed with the perverse economic incentives of an infinitely scaleable journal that makes thousands of dollars for every article it accepted. I was an early editor at the journal, and soon clashed with the publishing staff, who made it next-to-impossible to reject junk articles. I resigned from the journal 10 years ago, because the path they were taking was a journey to publishing nonsense for cash.

Fast-forward 10 years, and Frontiers publishes more articles than all society journals put together. Frontiers in Immunology publishes ~10,000 articles a year; as a reference, reputable society journals such as Immunology & Cell Biology publish ~100 papers a year. Considering Frontiers earns ~$3000 per article, it is a massive profit-making machine. The vision of transforming science publishing is gone, replaced with growth at all costs. Add onto this a huge incentive to publish papers, even ones that no one reads, and it added to a perverse economy, with "paper mills" being paid to write fake papers and predatory journals being paid to publish them, all to fill up a CV.

Generative AI turbo-charges this mess. Some basic competency at using generative AI, and scamming scientists can rapidly fake a paper. This is where #ratdckgate comes in. The paper is obviously faked, text and figures. Yet it got published. A lot of failures in the system here, in particular perverse incentives to cheat, the generation of an efficient marketplace for cheating, and a journal that over-rode the peer reviewers because it wanted the publication costs. 

As the Telegraph reports, this is "a cock up on a massive scale".

No one really cares about this article, one way or another. Frontiers has withdrawn the article, and even congratulated itself on its rapid action for the one fake paper that went viral, without dealing with the ecosystem it has created. The reason why the scientific community cares is that this paper is just the tip of the iceberg. The scientific publishing system was designed to catch good-faith mistakes. It wasn't designed to catch fraud, and isn't really suitable for that purpose. Yes, reviewers and editors look out for fraud, but as generative AI advances it will be harder and harder to catch it, even at decent journals. It is an arms race that we can't win, and many in the scientific publishing world are struggling to see a solution.

There are many lessons to be learned here:

• The scientific career pathway provides perverse incentives to cheat. That is human nature, but we need to change research culture to minimise it
• Even good-intentions can create toxic outcomes, such as open access creating the pay-to-publish market place. We need to redesign scientific publishing fully aware of the way it may be gamed, and pre-empt toxic outcomes
• Peer review isn't perfect, and isn't even particularly good at catching deliberate fraud. We probably need to separate peer-review from fraud detection, and take a seperate approach to each
• Scientific journals range radically in the quality of peer review. We need a rigorous accreditation system to provide the stick to publish journals that harm science
• Generative AI has huge potential for harm, and we need to actively design systems to mitigate those harms

Improving scientific publishing is a challenge for all of us. In a world where science is undermined by politics, we cannot afford to provide the ammunition to vaccine deniers, climate change deniers, science skeptics and others who want to discredit science for their own agenda. So we need to get our house in order.

International Day of Women in Science

New positions in the lab!

We are recruiting two new positions, a Postdoctoral Research Scientist and a Research Laboratory Technician, to join our lab! 

This translational research project aims to develop novel technologies for treating neuroimmunology into clinic-ready molecules. You will contribute to the optimisation of therapeutics for brain delivery to patients, as part of the commercialisation pathway for a recently developed neuroinflammation treatment (Yshii et al, Nature Immunology 2022). The laboratory is an inclusive, international and diverse team, supportive of your personal and career development. A positive approach to kind and collaborative interactions with the team is essential! You will benefit from the collaborative and collegial environment of the laboratory, and potential career growth opportunities within the laboratory and within the developing spin-off company Aila Biotech are possible for a successful post-holders. 

The Post-doctoral Scientist post would be suitable for a new PhD graduate who is motivated to develop new skills in both neuroimmunology and in commercialisation. The post is designed to result in scientific publications and patent applications. Post-doctoral Scientist's apply here.

The Research Laboratory Technician post would be suitable for a candidates from a range of backgrounds, such as experience in animal handling, or a basic laboratory experience, or a Masters-level degree in immunology, neuroscience, or a related field. Applicants are not expected to enter with the full range of these skills or experiences. Research Laboratory Technician's apply here.

2023 Lafferty debate

The Lafferty debate is, for me, always the highlight of the Australian and New Zealand Society of Immunology annual meeting. The comedic faux-scientific debate is always a huge amount of fun, and is part of what creates the community feeling of immunology within Australia and New Zealand. 

Being asked to take-part in the debate, 20 years after leaving Australia, was, by contrast, petrifying. 

Debates have always felt like something I should enjoy doing, but actually the need to argue one side, regardless of how logic pans out, it something extremely foreign to me. To do so in a funny manner, in front of hundreds of my colleagues, on the big moment of the year... that is just not me. 

I'm up on stage, giving talks and fielding questions, so often that I should have felt comfortable with the "let's wing it and have fun" approach of my team members. But for whatever reason, anything other than a scientific talk triggers my performance phobia, and this really made me anxious!

A huge relief that both teams of the debate played off each other so well, the comedic timing landed, and the whole event was actually really enjoyable! I'm not sure I'd ever sign up for it again, but I am really glad that I was a part of such a key event with talented and funny immunologists.

Congratulations Dr Julika Neumann!

Congratulations to the amazing Dr Julika Neumann, who just graduated from the lab, as our final Belgian PhD!

Julika secretly did two PhDs rather than one, with an outstanding clinical immunology PhD where she discovered a new immunodeficiency (and won the Golden Pipette!) and another systems immunology project on SARS-CoV2, with the first paper published and several systems vaccinology papers coming out soon!

Julika was a talented immunologist and bioinformatician, but above all an exceptional team-player and detail-orientated fixer. We all congratulate Julika on an exceptional PhD and her positive impact on all of those around her over the past four years. All the best Julika!

2023 lab retreat re-cap

We just completed a very successful lab retreat, this year held at St Catharine's College, Cambridge. It was perfect timing, with our new students starting and getting to meet the entire team, not to mention getting incredible feedback from everyone on their new projects. I'm so proud to be a part of such an amazing team of scientists!

I started by recapping the successes of the lab in 2023 - and there have been plenty! 16 papers published so far this year (and another 12 submitted!), ~£1.5m brought into the department in grants and fellowships, our spin-off company Aila Biotech getting into an accelerator program, and successful alumni moving on to great things! But we run the lab retreat for the future, not the past. Two full days of exciting science, from projects right at the conceptual phase through to projects that have matured and need the finishing touches. Of course it wouldn't be a lab retreat with the presentation of the Golden Pipette! This year's went to Amy Dashwood, a talented scientist and a positive influence on team culture. 

We had great team building exercises too! We had to guess each person's pathway to becoming a scientist, picking out baby photos and origin story, matching up role-models to teenage pictures, and picking out the motivation for each lab member to be in science today. Plus a set of AI-generated limericks for each person, and social activities from a pub lunch to walks through the Cambridge botanic gardens and museums. 

I also really appreciated having our external guests come in to give their wisdom to the team, and it was especially nice that many of our external experts are lab alumni!

Overturning how we think about immune regulation across the body

by Kat Steer

A Fellow at St Catharine’s College has led extensive new research that looks set to overturn the established model about how one type of white blood cell regulates immune responses in tissues – what was assumed to be a static part of the immune system is actually dynamic, opening the door to new treatments for a range of conditions.

Professor Adrian Liston (2023) is Professor of Pathology at the University of Cambridge and has run a research laboratory with Dr James Dooley since 2009, which relocated to Cambridge’s Department of Pathology earlier this year.

Professor Liston explains, “All of us are familiar with immune activation in our daily lives – the body’s response to injury or infection – but immune regulation is just as important to our health. A poorly regulated or hyperactive immune system can be hugely damaging, as we see in cases of flu, COVID-19, autoimmune diseases and inflammatory diseases. The team based at our laboratory have been conducting a broad range of research to learn more about the different processes and cells that are key to immune system regulation.”

Their latest findings are focused on a group of white blood cells known as regulatory T cells (Tregs) which have a role in regulating or suppressing other cells in the immune system. Over the last 10 years, scientists have established that Tregs are found not just in our blood but also throughout different tissues in the body. It is also known that Tregs play a significant role beyond controlling the immune system by enabling the body to return normal (homeostasis) and orchestrating repair and rejuvenation after an immune response.

“A decade of research has begun to establish the importance of Tregs but there is still so much we don’t know for sure. Like so many other scientists, we accepted the prevailing wisdom that Tregs travel into tissues where they remained as a static part of the immune system and specialised to their surroundings – an idea borrowed from evidence about another type of white blood cell (macrophages). We never set out to challenge this model, but our new findings indicate that these Tregs are really different from what we all thought.”

After an earlier successful study into Treg cells in the brain, the Liston-Dooley laboratory set out to complete an ambitious systematic analysis of the Tregs throughout the body, which has involved studying tissues from 48 different tissues in mice.

“It was only once we took global look at the body as a whole that it was possible to see for the first time that the Tregs in tissues are not specialised or static. In fact, they are highly dynamic and percolate throughout the body to serve different organs, moving from one place to the next as needed.

“It is exciting to know more about these important cells and potentially open up a new avenue for treating diseases – if we can find a way of boosting the number of Tregs in targeted areas of the body, then we can help the body do a better job of repairing itself or managing immune responses. We are in the early stages of planning a clinical trial to understand more about the benefits of boosting the levels of Tregs and look forward to sharing what we find.”

This work was supported by the European Research Council, the Wellcome Trust, and the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council.

Pre-print details

Burton O, et al. The tissue-resident regulatory T cell pool is shaped by transient multi-tissue migration and a conserved residency program. bioRxiv 2023.08.14.553196; doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2023.08.14.553196

Golden Pipette awarded to Amy Dashwood

Congratulations go to Amy Dashwood, winner of the 2023 Golden Pipette! The Golden Pipette is handed down from winner to winner in recognition of elegant experiments and a positive contribution to lab culture. This year Amy has won the Golden Pipette for her elegant experiments creating a genetic chimera system to analyse microglia homeostasis, and for being an outstanding lab citizen and mentor to undergraduate students. Well done Amy!

Congratulations Amy Dashwood!

Best Student Talk at the Babraham Institute Lab Talks. Well deserved!

Stay tuned to find out her really cool work on microglia homeostasis!