Ed recently joined the Crick on secondment to set up the Antibody Selection Laboratory. His work will focus on understanding how and why different individuals make different antibodies after the same encounter with an antigen. Learn more about how he's settling into life at the Crick ...

Tell us about your career so far 

I studied medicine in Cambridge, completing the MB/PhD programme. My post-graduate medical training, with a focus on kidney discriceases, was spread across hospitals in and around Cambridge. I held a series of academic training posts during which I performed post-doctoral research at the Babraham Institute. I first came to the Crick for a post-doctoral clinical fellowship in 2020 and joined UCL in 2023.

Where were you before joining the Crick?

Between 2023 and 2024 I started my group at the then Department of Renal Medicine, UCL, at the Royal Free Hospital in Hampstead. The Department has re-organised as the UCL Centre for Kidney and Bladder Health, cutting across adult nephrology and urology at the Royal Free, children’s services at Great Ormond St Hospital and also the UCLH clinic that bridges patients between paediatrics and adult services. This reorganisation is exciting – too often in biomedical research there is a delay in spreading advances to paediatrics, and this is a part of doing that better.

What attracted you to the Crick?

During my time as a postdoc at the Crick I made some great friends and colleagues at all career levels, both in research groups and in the Crick’s science technology platforms (STPs). It’s great to be back (officially!) to work together again. The access to cutting edge technologies is second to none. The Crick’s ongoing study looking at respiratory virus infections and vaccinations (the Legacy Study) and the WWW Consortium are both invaluable for the lab’s work.

What will your lab be working on?

Building out of the frenzied work of the pandemic, my lab, funded by an MRC clinician scientist fellowship, tries to understand how and why different individuals make different antibodies after the same encounter with an antigen. Amongst healthy individuals, some select much more diverse antibodies that neutralise variants yet to exist, whereas others do not. We want to understand how that scales down to individual B cells, the immune cells responsible for producing antibodies. We aim to understand how that process is controlled, whether it can go wrong in antibody-mediated autoimmune diseases and how we might be able to modify it during vaccination to encourage a broader antibody response.

We are particularly interested in an autoimmune disease called IgA nephropathy, which is antibody mediated and is the most common inflammatory kidney disease which can start at any age: children, teenagers, younger and older adults. We think we can use learnings from our vaccine work to understand this disease better. There are lots of antibody-mediated diseases, and we are very happy to collaborate with others!

How are you settling into life at the Crick?

Settling into life at the Crick has been straightforward. We have a brilliant team at the hub and our quadrant manager has been magnificent in getting us started. I was a bit restless during the setup process, but it couldn’t realistically have been any smoother.

How have you found setting up your lab?

As my lab had only just started at UCL when we were seconded to the Crick, we made a strategic decision not to get too set up ahead of moving. We swerved starting a new wet lab at UCL and having to move it all within a few months, and there was a pile of dry lab work to churn through! Lots of Crick groups and STPs have helped us get up and running, so we have been well looked after. We don’t have space to thank everyone separately: we are immensely grateful for their help.

And finally – in an alternate universe where you weren’t a researcher, what would you be doing?

If I had to stop being a researcher tomorrow, then it’s back to clinical work. If I get to go back 20 years, I think I’d still have gone to medical school. But no idea from there: you’re shaped by encounters with inspiring patients and colleagues along the way, lots of which feel like chance – so it's hard to imagine things would unfold exactly the same.