GlaxoSmithKline-funded PhD studentship: Immune Ageing

Applications are invited for fully funded, four-year PhD studentships based at the Cambridge Institute for Therapeutic Immunology and Infectious Disease (CITIID), within the Department of Medicine at the University of Cambridge. The studentship programme is part of CG-AGE, a collaborative project between the Department of Medicine and Glaxo Smith Kline , focused on the mechanisms and phenotypes of immune ageing.

Project The UK population is getting older, with nearly 1 in 5 individuals over the age of 60 and over half a million aged 90 or older (2021 Census). This is important, because ageing is strongly associated with altered immune function, leading to increased susceptibility to infectious and inflammatory diseases, which are major contributors to morbidity and mortality in older adults.

A major limitation to our understanding of human immune age has been a reliance on analysis of few immune traits in comparatively small cohorts with limited representation of the oldest individuals. To overcome this, we have integrated multiple datasets to identify and validate latent age-related trajectories, capturing quantitative traits reflecting immune exposure and response, and uncovering highly stereotyped and non-linear trajectories of immune ageing.

Here, we propose to build on our existing work to quantify multiple immune age metrics in a longitudinal population of ageing individuals undergoing annual immune challenge in the form of vaccination. We will relate these immune age metrics to a variety of outcomes including correlates of vaccine protection and clinical outcomes with the aim of inferring mechanistic processes that drive immune ageing.

Students will use multi-omic single cell methods to identify cell subpopulations associated with both chronological and immunological ageing (defined by a range of different ageing metrics), their associated differentiation trajectories and multi-omic characteristics and will relate these to the magnitude, breadth and efficacy of vaccine-induced protection. These data will deeply characterise the aged immune response, explore the mechanism of changes occurring and support development of experimental medicine interventions to modulate aged immunity.

The successful candidates will each undertake a four-year research project with the overall aims of (1) characterising aged immune responses, (2) exploring how they change longitudinally in an ageing population, and (3) investigating how this knowledge can be exploited to better modulate aged immunity. Depending on the specific interests of the student, individual projects may include exploitation of computational machine learning approaches in concert with wet-lab experiments on aged samples.

Wet-lab experiments will include generation of multi-omic single cell datasets alongside immune organoid models, while dry-lab work will seek to interpret age-related changes and their impact on immunity using advances in the capabilities of machine learning/AI techniques.

Students will be a core part of CG-AGE, a five-year collaboration between the University of Cambridge and GSK, led by Prof. Eoin McKinney, that seeks to better understand immune ageing and how to modulate it. Individual studentships may have (co) supervision from investigators affiliated with the CG-AGE programme.

PhD programme

The studentships are 4 years in length, starting from October 2027, and will include an optional 6-month sabbatical period to be spent in another laboratory either in Cambridge or in GSK to gain additional skills and knowledge (this may optionally include a sabbatical GSK placement). Studentships include fees and maintenance for students eligible for Home fee status. For eligibility please check:https:// programme will include several studentships and aims to equip the next generation of scientists with an in depth understanding of the molecular and cellular basis underlying immune ageing together with how that intersects with the pathogenesis of immune and infectious disorders.

Students will have access to training in scientific communication, critical thinking, career development, and other transferrable skills through:

-One-to-one supervision: you will receive direct guidance from your supervisors and attend weekly journal clubs.

-Presentations: give one poster presentation per year to the Department, and present your research at our seminar series and annual symposia.

-Networking: hear from recent alumni and non-academic representatives on their career…