Dr Espe Perucha

I did my PhD in Medicine in Spain. In 2006 I was recruited to KCL to work as a post-doc in the translational portfolio of Dr Maria Hernandez-Fuentes, Prof. Robert Lechler and Prof. Graham Lord laboratories. In 2012 I moved to Prof. Andre Cope’s team, where my research focused on dissecting the pathways for aberrant T cell activation in Rheumatoid Arthritis patients as part of the EU-funded BTCure project. Here, we undercovered a new role for cellular metabolism to regulate immune cell function, which ended up being the main research theme of my lab. The SpLAB started in late 2017, when I got a lecturer position at KCL. We are based at the Centre for Inflammation Biology and Cancer Immunology (CIBCI). The lab is interested on mechanisms of immune activation and tolerance in man, from molecules to cells and the whole individual. We work on understanding how the immune system activates and also regulates, with focus on the interaction between cellular metabolism and immune function. Our final aim is to find new ways to modulate the human immune response, in order to restore homeostasis (which is defective in chronic inflammation) or boost the effector arm, which may benefit the body when it fights infection or cancer.