iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Can you actually get mega-rich through a career in science? Is biohacking in a DIY lab a sensible option? Why is there a cat playing chess? Should you just drop out of the rat race and take up a career in landscaping? These questions and more are answered!

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Does it actually change your life if your high school grades weren't so good? Do you fall behind by taking on a tech job in #pharma rather than doing a #PhD? How bad would it actually be to fudge the results a little for a paper? Would that #StartUp idea have actually worked?

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Our new book "The Professor, the Pipette & the Path Not Taken", explores alternative careers and lives that you could have taken With more than 250 different pathways and 10 unique endings, this unique branching story allows you to choose your path through science and life

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Adrian Liston @labliston.bsky.social · 25/05/2026

Ever wonder how your career (and life!) could have turned out differently if you had picked that PhD project in London instead, or gone into #patientadvocacy rather than a #postdoc? What different lives could you have lived? Now you can find out! www.amazon.co.uk/Professor-Pi...

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Latest graduation hat - congratulations Dr Arman Ghodsinia!

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Adrian Liston @labliston.bsky.social · 26/04/2026

Anyone in Cambridge missing a tortoise?

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Adrian Liston @labliston.bsky.social · 21/04/2026

Sometimes science leads us to unexpected places. For example, work we started during the COVID lockdown, may help treating the "Curse of the Pharaohs". Read all about it at Science Immunology. PS, we don't support tomb-robbing of ancient Egyptian burial sites. www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

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If you are interested in the people behind the science, Tombi started in rural Zimbabwe and James went from foster care to homelessness. Their stories "I won't become a Statistic", and "From the Streets to the Lab", in our book "Self-Doubt", are a real inspiration. www.amazon.co.uk/Self-Doubt-A...

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The best part is, because we only altered the immunology of the lung tissue, the anti-viral responses generated in the LN were intact, so we could reduce lung inflammation without giving the infection a free-pass. This is why tissue immunology has such potential - only hit the site needed!

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So we teamed up with @kuleuvenuniversity.bsky.social and tested our AAV-cytokine delivery approach in coinfected (IAPA) mice. Success! In every measure we tested, our treatment reduced severity down from fatal respiratory failure down closer to a regular flu infection.

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But Aspergillus is a hidden killer. The Wauters, Vande Velde and Humblet-Baron teams at @kuleuvenuniversity.bsky.social found that coinfection of influenza and aspergillus is extremely deadly, with an ICU mortality rate of >50%, >70% if immunocompromised. Likewise, coinfection in mice is lethal.

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Aspergillus is a fungus common in decaying soil, that can infect the lung. For healthy individuals it is rarely a problem, and is easily cleared Fun fact: Aspergillus may be the "Curse of the Pharaohs" as Egyptian tombs were full of spores, and tomb robbers would have breathed in very high doses

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We never ended up testing it in SARS-CoV2 infection - by that point the #vaccine had come along. But COVID isn't the only important lung infection. You might not even have heard of one of the most deadly: Influenza-Associated Pulmonary Aspergillosis (IAPA)

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The system works great! AAV6.2.CC10 driving #IL2 production gives an expansion of #lung #Tregs without impacting other sites, even the draining LN of the lung. And it is not just IL2 - in the same way we can drive #IL10 or #IL1RA in the lung without altering systemic levels. Pick your own cargo!

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It took quite some trial and error, but eventually we found that intranasal delivery of AAV6.2 capsid with the CC10 promoter drove tight expression of our cargo by club cells, limited to the lung tissue. Gorgeous imaging from the team of @regisjoulia.bsky.social ia.bsky.social

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This story started during the COVID pandemic. Our first Cambridge PhD students joined during lockdown, and a talented student, @drntombizodwa.bsky.social, wanted to work on a potential therapeutic. Only essential people (James Dooley, not me!) could be in the lab, but they started on the problem

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We have an exciting new story out at @science.org's Science Immunology! It is all about using #AAV-mediated cytokine delivery to change the lung environment. We can boost #lung #Tregs or delivery anti-inflammatory #cytokines, preventing fatal respiratory collapse www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

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Completely independent immune phenotype platform, and the same message - autoinflammation of unknown origin patients clustered together, and shared many signature changes with Still's disease patients

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We wrote the paper up, submitted and waited for the reviewer comments. Quite constructive and improved the clinical aspects of our paper. The hardest ask was for serum proteomics on all samples - fortunately Dominique De Seny's team at @universitedeliege.bsky.social had being doing just this!

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It was striking, however, that the signature immunological changes were shared with patients with #StillsDisease. We could still distinguish the conditions (AUC 0.79), but changes such as CD38 and BAFF moved in parallel between the conditions

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But the patients already knew they weren't healthy. The clinical challenge is to distinguish them from other #autoinflammatory conditions. Fortunately, we ran in parallel samples from confounding conditions with similar demographics, and the patients still had a distinct immune profile!

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Fast-forward a decade (!) of sample collection and analysis, and immune status distinguishes patients compared to healthy controls (AUC 0.83), with CD38+ #Tcells elevated and memory #Bcells way down. This shared phenotype suggests this *is* a distinct condition, not diverse undiagnosed patients

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We worked with the amazing Carine Wouters and clinicians across Europe to collect samples for a #systemsimmunology analysis together with the Humblet-Baron lab at @kuleuvenuniversity.bsky.social. Critically, we we able to access samples at the point of diagnosis, many still untreated.

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