Well, I've been trying
to understand why in some individuals there immune system is
under active and fails to protect us
against infections
and why in other individuals it becomes
overactive
and destroys our own organs and
tissues leading to autoimmune diseases.
What we are really trying to do, is
understand
disease mechanisms, what we call
pathogenesis.
As researcher, I define myself as
somebody that is very passionate
about what I do
and would like to make a difference
and hopefully through my work and
discoveries of
my team, make life slightly better
for people that are suffering from really debilitating diseases.
Technology has made a huge difference
from that point of view, that's thanks to
the human genome be sequenced
and thanks to the development of affordable and
accessible deep sequencing technologies,
we now can
very easily grow the entire genome
of not just a mouse that might develop disease but what we're doing now is
going into the human patients that develop disease and starting to
understand what are the precise mutations that cause disease.
And it's only through understanding how disease comes about that we can start thinking
about developing
much needed targeted therapies. What excites me?
It is the discovery, I mean every day
that a student to my lab comes and tells me
about this piece of data that either was completely
unexpected and serendipitous
or we had been hypothesising for a long
time and trying to prove.
It’s easy in any case, extremely exciting,
so it is those
discoveries, breakthroughs, not just my excitement, but the excitement of my team
And the ultimate idea that we might be
making a difference to
people with debilitating diseases.
