Henry McSorley

Me: (birdwatching) ooo a brown one

We made a short animation explaining what goes wrong in the lungs during asthma! 🫁🎬 Designed for the public, students & patients—check out how immune cells respond to threats & how asthma treatments work.

Big thanks to @WellcomeTrust & Acteria!

Gonna steal this sign for my office door

Call for 20 Assistant Professor positions Karolinska Institutet is a world-leading medical university with a long and proud history of ground-breaking research. We are now recruiting outstanding early-career researchers with particularly exce...

Karolinska is looking for 20 (!!) assistant professors and offering 6 year appointments with ~1M USD startup packages.

ki.se/en/about-ki/...

Baby voice: Things can be good without being perfect. You must learn to grasp this fact. If you are unable to do so, you will have a very thankless life, politically and personally.

In our latest work we've explored associations between the fecal bile acid pool and helminth infection status in school aged children in Uganda. Have a read and see what we found!

Global diversity of soil-transmitted helminths reveals population-biased genetic variation that impacts diagnostic targets - Nature Communications This study analysed genetic data of soil-transmitted helminths from 27 countries, revealing diversity impacting molecular test accuracy and highlighting the need to adapt diagnostics for effective STH...

Great to be a (small) part of this beautiful new study on global diversity of soil transmitted #helminths from @stephenrdoyle.bsky.social and colleagues 🧪 www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Research Associate in Mucosal Immunology :Manchester

The fantastic Menon Lab (@madhvimenon.bsky.social) in the @lydiabeckeriii.bsky.social in Manchester are hiring!!
🚨DO NOT MISS YOUR CHANCE TO APPLY!🚨

www.jobs.manchester.ac.uk/Job/JobDetai...

Postdoc seeking to unravel how lung-infiltrating #Bcells contribute to chronic lung disease #immunosky

They were getting right into it

Crowd of cows

Cows chowing down

Happy grass-filled cows

The perils of living in cow-country. I thought I was putting the grass cuttings on the compost heap. Apparently no, I was filling up the cow feeding trough. The cows made it clear that this was the best day ever.

🚨 Abstract submissions are OPEN for the British Society for Immunology Congress 2025! #BSI25

Join 1,500+ immunologists in Liverpool between 1–4 Dec, for 4 days of science, workshops & networking.

Submit your abstract by 3 Sept & showcase your research! 🔗 bit.ly/4kYXvLN

Thats cool, congrats Lucy! Will be looking forward to seeing what you come up with.

Delighted to be on the new Editorial Board and looking forward to helping refresh the BSI’s BiteSized Immunology resource ⬇️

What?

I... WHAT??

There are few things you less want to dig up in the garden than yellow tape saying “danger high voltage”. I’m not saying it’s the worst thing, but it’s top 5.

cartoon for the guardian by Stephen Collins - script as follows: [Scene is a darkened LOFT. Amongst the boxes and junk are FOUR KNACKERED OLD FANS - three tower fans and one circular, with cracked grey plastic and buttons missing. One fan, TOWER FAN 1, is a bit taller than the others, and is addressing them] 1 TOWER FAN 1: Right lads, get ready. 2 TOWER FAN 1: This is our time. 3 TOWER FAN 1: The time when we remember who we are, and why we’re here. 4 TOWER FAN 1: We are the four crap fans in a British person’s loft, and we are here to make absolutely no difference whatsoever. 5 TOWER FAN 1: I know what you’re thinking, lads: 6 TOWER FAN 1: Surely this will be the year they finally replace us? 7 TOWER FAN 1: Our plastic’s gone all brown... I haven’t oscillated since 2018... 8 TOWER FAN 1: Dave here sounds like a spitfire and blows like a sad cat’s sigh… TOWER FAN 2: Cheers mate 9 TOWER FAN 1: But no. These people are British, and every year, they forget the sun exists. By the time they remember, new fans will cost *four million pounds* on Amazon. 10 TOWER FAN 1: So we’ll be back down there... shovelling thick air across the moaning faces of a species that cannot comprehend the concept of air conditioning, or even just closing the curtains when it’s hot out... 11 TOWER FAN 1: ...while they incessantly bang on about normally hot countries which this country is now temporarily a bit hotter than. 12 [The loft hatch opens and a person comes up the ladder] PERSON: APPARENTLY IT’S HOTTER THAN GREECE, LISA

british fan chat

Congratulations Matt, what a cool story!

Our latest story describes the amazing evolutionary battle between malaria parasite and human. The parasite evolved RIFINs to bind inhibitory KIR receptors and suppress immune cell function while humans have activating KIR receptors to bind these RIFINs to kill parasites!

An Il12 mRNA-LNP adjuvant enhances mRNA vaccine–induced CD8 T cell responses IL-12 is dispensable for CD8 T cell responses to mRNA vaccination, but an Il12 mRNA-LNP enhances CD8 T cell memory and protection.

mRNAs encoding adjuvant proteins boost immunity. A fantastic study from Hunter et al shows the value of IL12. Study validates original work on this concept, ref below.
Kudos to the authors on this exciting discovery!
www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

@drdsmyth.bsky.social now on here!

Congratulations to all authors, especially the shared first authors Dr Danielle Smyth (not on Bluesky) and @suzannehodge.bsky.social as well as @vshek.bsky.social and many others not on here!

We are really excited about this work and hope it leads to other vaccines based on immunomodulatory parasite proteins.

Vaccination can also be a tool to investigate the effects of blocking HpARI/BARI during infection, important as we still cannot genetically engineer the parasite.

Flow cytometry plots showing increased ILC2 and Th2 cytokine responses after combination vaccination

We found that this combination vaccine worked super well, showing all the best elements of the HpARI and the HpBARI vaccines, boosting ILC2s, Th2s, goblet cells and cytokine responses.

Egg burden after A2+B+BH2 vaccination, showing the vaccine protects very well

So we combined the successful vaccines to make a HpARI2+HpBARI+HpBARI_Hom2 (A2+B+BH2) cocktail. Its super effective!

We were then asked at review to see what the effects of HpARI+HpBARI vaccination would be - a great reviewer comment that genuinely improved the paper.

Like HpARI2 vaccination, HpBARI+HpBARI_Hom2 vaccination was also capable of protecting against Hpb infection.

Graph showing increased GATA3+ Th2 cells with HpBARI+HpBARI_Hom2 vaccination.

Vaccinating with HpBARI+HpBARI_hom2, like with HpARI2 vaccination, had big effects on the immune response to the parasite. In this case, there was no effect on ILC2 responses, but an increase in Th2 cells, and their cytokines.

Flow cytometry plot showing ST2 suppression during Hpb infection, and reversal of suppression only when HpBARI+HpBARI_Hom2 were vaccinated in a cocktail

So next, what about HpBARI? There is also a family of HpBARI proteins - HpBARI, and HpBARI_Hom2. We found that only by vaccinating with both proteins together could we reverse the ST2 suppression seen during Hpb infection. So these HpBARI proteins clearly have redundant effects.

(It shouldnt be underestimated how excited we were by this - recombinant vaccines against helminths are notoriously difficult, and no recombinant vaccines against any parasitic nematode are currently available)