Landsteiner lecture by James Lee | A master regulator of inflammation in IBD?

On 23 June 2025, James Lee MD PhD (The Francis Crick Institute, Cambridge, UK) will give a Landsteiner Lecture at Sanquin Research.

Title: A master regulator of inflammation in IBD?

Host: Iosifina Foskolou

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Abstract
Autoimmune and inflammatory diseases are on the rise, and now affect nearly 1 in 10 adults. These lifelong, incurable illnesses often develop in young people and have major effects on sufferers' lives. Better treatments are urgently needed, but the failure rate of drugs entering clinical development is high - in part because these diseases remain poorly understood. This lecture will illustrate how genetics could address this challenge. By investigating a gene desert on chr21q22, independently linked to multiple inflammatory diseases, including IBD, we discovered a central regulator of human macrophage inflammation and a pathogenic pathway that is potentially druggable. This highlights the considerable, yet largely untapped, opportunity to resolve disease biology from non-coding genetic associations.  

Biography
James Lee is a Clinician Scientist Group Leader at the Francis Crick Institute and a Consultant Gastroenterologist at the Royal Free Hospital. He trained in medicine at the University of Oxford and gained his PhD from the University of Cambridge in 2012. In 2015, he was awarded a Wellcome Trust Intermediate Clinical Fellowship and spent 2 years of this award at Harvard University before returning to the University of Cambridge in 2018 to establish a research group at the newly-opened Cambridge Institute for Therapeutic Immunology and Infectious Disease. He moved to the Crick in 2021 where he leads the Genetic Mechanisms of Disease laboratory – seeking to translate genetic associations into a better understanding of autoimmune and inflammatory disease biology.