Professor Daniel Pennington
Professor of Molecular Immunology
Centre: Immunobiology
Email: d.pennington@qmul.ac.uk
Telephone: 020 7882 2302
Twitter: @DanPennington1
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Professor Pennington obtained his PhD from the National Institute for Medical Research in North London under the supervision of Dr. Elaine Dzierzak, where he studied the interaction of HIV regulatory proteins with the immune system. After spending a year at Yale University School of Medicine with Prof. Richard Flavell, he moved to the lab of Dr. Mike Owen at Cancer Research UK, London, where he commenced studies on T cell development. Prof. Pennington moved to the Blizard Institute, Barts and The London School of Medicine (Queen Mary University of Lon-don) in 2005, from Prof. Adrian Hayday’s Department of Immunobiology at Guy’s King’s and St. Thomas’ School of Medicine (Guy’s Hospital), where his work focused on the development of gamma/delta T cells.
Summary
The organs in the body that interface with the environment (e.g. skin; gut; lungs), need immune surveillance, first to limit systemic propagation of microbes that penetrate epithelial barriers, and second to maintain epithelial integrity from the threat of mutagenesis and the potential for systemic dissemination of malignant cells.
Our recent work has built on observations that immune surveillance of organs is critically contributed to by sets of unconventional T cells, some of which may be constitutively resident within particular, non-lymphoid tissues such as the gut. Intriguingly, these intraepithelial T cell populations not only have direct anti-pathogen and anti-tumour effector function, but are also associated with anti-inflammatory immunoregulatory responses that are implicated in many autoimmune pathologies.
With this as a basis to our work, the lab is working to establish an improved understanding of the development and function of unconventional T cells, focusing on their thymic development, and using the gut as a model system to study their function in the control of pathogens and in the immunosurveillance of tumours.