Complex Disease Colloquium: Clare Lloyd (Imperial College London)

As I was getting ready to write the weekly blurb for our colloquium and I was searching my memory and PubMed, I was (not for the first time) struck by the depth and breadth of the footprint that our next speaker, Clare Lloyd, is leaving on lung biology and immunology. Training her sights on allergy and asthma pathogenesis, Clare has dissected the role of innate lymphoid cells, T follicular helper cells, mast cells, the lung extracellular matrix and the epithelial barrier, all the way to the respiratory microbiome and its shaping by a farm environment. All of this would be impressive enough. But perhaps even more impressive is the most recent turn in Clare's experimental trajectory, which is taking her into an uncharted territory where space and time determine the functional outcome of cellular cross-talks in the lung. Until recently, these fundamental issues could only be addressed descriptively, but the advent of single-cell spatial transcriptomics now allows adventurous scientists like Clare to ask how location within an organ and timing of interactions influence the function of its cellular components - both the resident ones and those recruited by inflammatory disease processes. The results of this work, and the where-and when paradigm emerging from Clare's research, are transforming our understanding of lung biology - which is why I am especially delighted to have Clare share her perspective with us. Alas, our colloquium is ending for this semester, but what an end it will have....