Immune-mediated inflammatory diseases can cause persistent inflammation, tissue damage and lifelong ill health. Our challenge is to understand how immune balance and tissue health can be restored, creating the possibility of sustained remission without long-term treatment.
Treatments that suppress inflammation have transformed the care of immune-mediated inflammatory diseases. However, many people require long-term treatment to control their disease, and inflammation can return when treatment is reduced or stopped.
Controlling inflammation is not necessarily the same as restoring health. We want to understand what prevents the immune system and affected tissues from returning to a healthy state, and what enables successful resolution of disease.
The Centre is investigating the biological processes that allow inflammation to resolve, immune regulation to be restored and damaged tissues to return towards a healthy state.
Our ambition is to use this understanding to develop new approaches that do more than suppress disease activity. Ultimately, we want to enable sustained, drug-free remission for people living with immune-mediated inflammatory diseases.
We are studying four immune-mediated inflammatory diseases: inflammatory arthritis, Sjögren’s disease, inflammatory bowel disease and autoimmune liver disease.
Rather than studying each disease in isolation, we will compare affected tissues and immune responses across diseases. This will help us identify mechanisms of restoration that are shared, as well as those that are specific to particular diseases or tissues.
Meeting this challenge requires different kinds of research to work together. Our programme connects data exploration, the study of mechanisms of tissue restoration and experimental medicine so that insights from patients and biological data can inform discovery, and discoveries can be tested and translated towards new approaches to treatment.
Explore our researchBy understanding what enables successful restoration of immune balance and tissue health, we aim to create the scientific foundations for treatments that achieve lasting resolution of disease rather than continued control of inflammation.
About the Centre