Anastasia Polycarpou

I am a postdoctoral researcher currently developing human ex vivo and in vivo immune challenge models of fibrosis in the team of Professor James Fullerton.

I have expertise in fibrotic disease and specialise in innate immunity, with emphasis on complement, Toll-like receptors, macrophages and host-microbial interactions.

After clinical qualification and research in epidemiology, I undertook a PhD in immunology on Toll-like receptors and inflammation at the William Harvey Research Institute, Barts and The London School of Medicine, Queen Mary University of London. Annexin-A1 is an endogenous glucocorticoid-regulated protein that plays an important role in inflammation. My project dissected several molecular mechanisms of Toll-like receptor signalling in murine macrophages to identify how Annexin-A1 regulates cell response to different TLR agonists. 

I began my postdoctoral career as a research fellow at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, where I completed a project on the role of TLR4 on human mycobacterial infection and the effect of BCG on trained macrophage immunity.  I have also secured funding and worked on a human neutrophil project investigating the role of FcgReceptors in erythema nodosum leprosum (ENL) or type 2 leprosy immune reaction. 

I have worked afterwards as a senior research fellow at King's College London in the team of Professor Steven Sacks, developing a PET tracer to image and quantify complement deposition in solid organs such as the heart in complement-mediated inflammatory conditions. During the COVID-19 pandemic, after securing funding from the British Society of Antimicrobial Chemotherapy, my colleagues and I undertook a project to explore the role of the lectin pathway pattern-recognition molecule Collectin-11 in the alveolar epithelial response to SARS-CoV-2 infection. 

I am now working with human skin explants derived from waste operative tissue (Oxford Musculoskeletal Biobank) to study pathogenic mechanisms of fibrosis and the evaluation of novel therapies to address these. I am also working on a human immune challenge model which seeks to evaluate whether different inflammatory stimuli can elicit responses relevant to fibrogenesis. The overall goal is to develop novel human translational models of fibrosis to interrogate the efficacy of anti-fibrotic drugs and studying the immunobiology of human fibrotic disease.