FCE News: Kings College London
Modifying T cell metabolism to enhance anti-tumour activity
Research from Dr Esperanza Perucha and colleagues at King’s College London has found that modifying T cells to use fructose as an energy source, instead of glucose, can enhance the anti-tumour activity of engineered T cells in low-glucose environments.
Cancer immunotherapy with engineered T cells has shown great promise in the treatment of some blood cancers; however their success remains limited in solid cancers. This is partly due to the hostile tumour microenvironment which, amongst other characteristics, has a limited supply of glucose – restricting T cell activity.
In the study, the team equipped chimeric antigen receptors (CARs) and ectopic T cell receptor (TCR) T cells with the ability to use fructose as their energy source, by engineering them to express GLUT5 – a protein that transports fructose into the cell. As a result, the “GLUT5-armoured” T cells had enhanced anti-tumour activity in low-glucose environments in both in vitro and in vivo models of solid tumours.
Check out the paper here: https://academic.oup.com/immunotherapyadv/article/5/1/ltaf018/8123265
Check out about the work of the Perucha lab: https://www.kcl.ac.uk/research/perucha-group
Professor Leonie Taams receives Outstanding Contribution to the BSI Award
Professor Leonie Taams, King’s FCE Director and FOCIS Board member, recently received the Outstanding Contribution to the BSI Award 2025.
The award recognises the contribution and impact of an individual who has been outstanding in their support for the British Society for Immunology.
Professor Alberto Sanchez-Fueyo receives ILTS Award
Professor Alberto Sanchez-Fueyo, Professor of Hepatology, Academic Head of the Institute of Liver Studies at King’s College London, and Honorary Transplant Hepatology Consultant at King’s College Hospital has been awarded the 2025 ILTS Basic Science Established Investigator Award (Senior Career) from the International Liver Transplantation Society.
Professor Alexandra Santos receives Thermo Fisher Scientific Allergy Research Award
Professor Alexandra Santos, who spoke at FOCIS 2024, was recently awarded the Thermo Fisher Scientific Allergy Research Award 2025. The esteemed award honours one international scientific researcher who has made remarkable progress and advancements in the field of allergy research, each year.
Professor Anthony Dorling receives OBE
Professor Anthony Dorling, who recently retired as Professor of Transplant Inflammation and Repair, was recognised in The King’s 2025 Birthday Honours List, receiving an OBE for his services to kidney patient care.
FCE NEWS: Benaroya Research Institute
In an article from Science Translational Medicine, researchers from Benaroya Research Institute (BRI) and the Allen Institute published the first results from the Sound Life Project (SLP) — a two-year study following 100 healthy individuals. This initial study from the SLP shows that innate immune activity and T cell activation are major axes of variation among healthy adults. Led by BRI scientists Megan Smithmyer, PhD, Alex Hu, PhD, Jane Buckner, MD, and Cate Speake, PhD, the research team used longitudinal cytometry data leveraging whole blood samples collected at 10 visits over 2 years to identify stable immune cell populations, defined as populations that varied more between individuals than within individuals. These populations included innate immune cells that are often lost to sample processing.
Surprisingly, participants could be grouped into four distinct “immunotypes” based on these immune cell populations. Immunotypes were associated with, but not completely defined by, age, sex, and CMV serostatus. Analysis of additional multi-omic datasets including whole-blood RNA sequencing, Olink proteomic profiling, and whole blood ex vivo stimulation revealed that innate immune activity and T cell activation differed by immunotype.
One immunotype — mostly composed of young, healthy female individuals — stood out for its high responsiveness to lipopolysaccharide (LPS), mature neutrophil frequency, and elevated inflammatory markers, resembling immune profiles more often seen in older adults. This raises important questions about early markers for autoimmune or inflammatory disease risk.
Launched in 2019, the SLP gathered blood samples and detailed health data through 10 study visits, creating a rich longitudinal dataset. Importantly, this approach provides new insights into immune variability in health and highlights the importance of understanding how the immune system drives or prevents immune-mediated diseases over time.
FCE NEWS: Yale Human and Translational Immunology Program
Prashanth Vallabhajosyula
Has published a paper entitled “Circulating Tissue Specific Extracellular Vesicles for Noninvasive Monitoring of Acute Cellular Rejection in Clinical Heart Transplantation” of interest to the FOCIS community. The publication is on EVs for noninvasive diagnosis of rejection in heart transplantation.
Korutla L, Hu R, Liu Y, Romano C, Habertheuer A, Abedi P, Wang H, Molugu S, Rostami S, Naji A, Nuqali A, Beasley M, Maulion C, Hahn S, Ahmad T, Wang Z, Sen S, Vallabhajosyula P. Circulating Tissue Specific Extracellular Vesicles for Noninvasive Monitoring of Acute Cellular Rejection in Clinical Heart Transplantation. Transplantation. 2025 Apr 16. doi: 10.1097/TP.0000000000005369. PMID: 40238644.
Ruth Montgomery
Professor of Medicine and Associate Dean for Scientific Affairs, Yale School of Medicine
Inducted as an American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) fellow.
“For novel and high impact studies of innate immunity that often exploit new technologies to understand the response of immune cells to human pathogens, aging, and autoimmunity.”
https://news.yale.edu/2025/03/27/eight-yale-faculty-members-named-aaas-fellows
David Hafler
William S. and Lois Stiles Edgerly Professor of Neurology and Professor of Immunobiology
Inducted as an American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) fellow.
“For bridging immunology, genetics, and neurology to understand the pathogenesis of multiple sclerosis, and elucidating key aspects of immune pathways.”
https://news.yale.edu/2025/03/27/eight-yale-faculty-members-named-aaas-fellows
Ellen Foxman
Has published a paper:
“Nasal biomarker testing to rule out viral respiratory infection and triage samples: a test performance study”.
The COVID-19 pandemic revealed an urgent need for better solutions for screening for respiratory viruses. In a new study in Lancet eBiomedicine, a collaborative team from the Yale Department of Laboratory Medicine report a biomarker-based solution for low-cost respiratory virus screening.
Link to Yale News Article: https://news.yale.edu/2025/06/23/screen-saver-simpler-less-costly-virus-testing-high-risk-settings
Amat JAR, Dudgeon SN, Cheemarla NR, Watkins TA, Green AB, Young HP, Peaper DR, Landry ML, Schulz WL, Foxman EF. Nasal biomarker testing to rule out viral respiratory infection and triage samples: a test performance study. EBioMedicine. 2025 Jun 20;117:105820. doi: 10.1016/j.ebiom.2025.105820. Epub ahead of print. PMID: 40543450; PMCID: PMC12216728.
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/ebiom/article/PIIS2352-3964(25)00264-6/fulltext
Foxman Lab Trainee news:
Krupa Subramaniam (post-graduate) won a trainee award and delivered a podium talk at the May 2025 AAI meeting.
Tim Watkins (graduate student) and Julien Amat (postdoctoral associate) were poster presenters at the June 2025 FOCIS meeting in Boston.