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Dr Loren Kell
Title: Defining the roles of XCI-Skewing and DNA damage in human immune ageing
Scope: This talk will present findings on how features of genomic dysregulation influence human immune ageing. It will present recent data characterising the immune ageing and cellular senescence phenotypes of a new cohort of twins discordant for XCI-skew, through a collaboration with Dr Amy Roberts at the King’s TwinsUK Institute. It will also show findings emphasising the role of DNA damage in accelerating human immune ageing, and how this can be alleviated using known anti-ageing compounds.
Bio: Dr Loren Kell is a postdoctoral researcher in the Translational Pharmacology Group, at the University of Oxford. Her research focuses on understanding sex differences in immunity across the life course, in part by leveraging the use of human immune challenge models.
Dr Amy Roberts
Title: Sex hormone levels influence the risk of skewed X chromosome inactivation
Scope: This talk will present recent findings from the TwinsUK cohort which implicate endogenous sex hormone levels as drivers of XCI-skew, representing the first identified environmental and genetic risk factors aside from chronological age. This work support earlier hypotheses that XCI-skew captures long-term changes to haematopoietic stem cells and we propose XCI-skew may have clinical relevance in postmenopausal females.
Bio: Dr Amy Roberts is a Research Fellow at the Department of Twin Research, Ageing and Genomic Epidemiology, King’s College London. Her current research focuses on skewed X chromosome inactivation (XCI-skew), a sex-specific cellular phenotype associated with adverse health outcomes in females.