Author: John Tregoning

The complex relationship between viruses and our immune system

Prof John TregoningVirus Appreciation Day, celebrated annually on 3 October, serves a dual purpose: to foster respect and understanding for viruses while raising awareness about their serious impacts on health. To mark the day, Professor John Tregoning from Imperial’s Department of Infectious Disease shares valuable insights into influenza viruses, highlighting their effects, the importance of vaccination, and ongoing research for universal vaccines against evolving strains in our latest blog.

Viruses have an enormous impact on human health, but they don’t only infect humans. Many viruses also infect animals, plants and even bacteria. Some viruses are quite promiscuous, infecting a wide range of animal species before passing on to humans through a process known as zoonotic transmission. One of the most problematic of these zoonotic infections is influenza virus.  

The main natural reservoir of influenza virus is wild birds, particularly ducks and geese. The virus can then transmit from these birds into domestic poultry, like chickens, and to livestock, such as pigs, before ultimately reaching people. In the past five years, a new strain of avian influenza has emerged with an ability to infect an even wider range of mammalian species. It has been detected in cattle in the US.  

Influenza, the disease caused by the virus, poses a substantial health burden. It resulted in nearly 15,000 deaths in the UK in the 2022-23 winter season. As well as death, it is a significant cause of hospitalisation and general illness – with a long tail of recovery. Additionally, influenza infection doubles the risk of heart attacks and strokes for up to a year after illness. Given these risks, getting an influenza vaccine this time of year is highly recommended. As I discovered researching my latest book Live Forever one of the simplest ways of extending your life is through vaccination. A vaccine will give you protection against the most severe forms of disease caused by the virus and protect you against subsequent illness.Vaccines train your body to recognise pathogens and fight them off. To do this, they make use of a facet of immunity called immune memory. When re-exposed to the same virus, your immune response activates faster and stronger, stopping the infection in its tracks. Several aspects of immune memory can prevent subsequent infections, but an important one are antibodies – this is a type of protein that is highly specific in what it can recognise and bind. When you are immunised with influenza vaccine, you make influenza virus specific antibodies that can stop the virus from infecting you. 

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St Mary’s Medical School: End of a chapter

Professor John Tregonning (front centre) in the early days of his career in the Department of Surgery and Cancer.

As the Faculty of Medicine prepares for the full decant of the St Mary’s Medical School Building, Professor John Tregoning, Professor in Vaccine Immunology in the Department of Infectious Disease, takes a trip down memory lane, reflecting on almost 20 years spent working in the “site steeped with history.”

On the 1st of August 2024, as part of a wider departmental move, I will leave the St Mary’s Hospital campus having worked there for nearly half my life. As such, it felt like time to reflect.

I first crossed the threshold when the St Mary’s medical school had just merged with Imperial in 1999, visiting friends who were studying there. Admittedly, it was not in an academic capacity. I went to the long-closed, but legendary bar in the basement (allegedly it closed because seeing future doctors heavily inebriated was off-putting to those visiting the hospital). I don’t remember much of that night, a fact I am putting down to time passed, rather than beers consumed.

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The one with a Nobel prize winner

Hadi Sallah, PhD student in John Tregoning's lab, working on RNA vaccines.
Hadi Sallah, PhD student in John Tregoning’s lab, working on RNA vaccines.

Dr John Tregoning, Professor in Vaccine Immunology, recounts his experience of working with Dr Katalin Karikó, Nobel Prize winner and the tenacious force behind the mRNA vaccines that helped change the course of the COVID-19 pandemic. Their recently published study investigates how RNA modifications impact the body’s immune response to infection, with the hopes of aiding the development of more effective mRNA vaccines.

Science is collaborative, we work with lots of different people to understand the world around us. Working with other people is one of the joys of the job. In our recently published study, Reducing cell intrinsic immunity to mRNA vaccine alters adaptive immune responses in mice, we had the privilege of working with Dr Katalin Karikó, joint winner of the 2023 Nobel prize in Physiology or Medicine.

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Can we save lives by deliberately infecting people?

A person's arm being injected

In the middle of the pandemic, scientists intentionally infected healthy volunteers with SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19. John Tregoning, Reader in Respiratory Infections at the Department of Infectious Disease, explains why these experiments, and the volunteers who take part in them, are critical to modern medicine.

In early March 2021, in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic, a surprising-sounding set of experiments were taking place. Researchers at Imperial College London (and separately at the University of Oxford) were deliberately infecting healthy volunteers with SARS-CoV-2. This was in fact the latest in a long line of controlled human infection studies – where volunteers are deliberately infected with an infectious pathogen under extremely controlled conditions.

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What is the new coronavirus (2019-nCoV) and what do we know about the outbreak so far?

This post was last updated on 31 January 2020

What is the ‘Wuhan coronavirus (2019-nCoV)’ and what do we know about it so far?
Dr John Tregoning (JT) from Imperial’s Department of Infectious Disease spoke to the School of Public Health’s Prof Steven Riley (SR) about the coronavirus outbreak that recently began in Wuhan, China.

Who has been working on the outbreak epidemiology at Imperial College London?

SR: I work as part of the MRC Centre for Global Infectious Disease  Analysis and the Abdul Latif Jameel Institute for Disease and Emergency Analytics centre with Prof Neil Ferguson, Dr Natsuko Imai, Dr Ilaria Dorigatti, Dr Anne Cori Prof Christl Donnelly, Prof Azra Ghani and Dr Marc Baguelin.

So what is this new coronavirus?

SR: It is a viral infection that was first discovered in the Chinese city of Wuhan in 2019 that has been associated with a number of cases of pneumonia – an infection of the tissue in the lungs. You might see it being called ‘2019-nCoV’, which stand for novel (or new) coronavirus. More information has been provided by the World Health Organisation. (more…)

20 Years at Imperial: what have I learnt?

Marking 20 years since Dr John Tregoning arrived at Imperial College London as a PhD student, he reflects on what he’s learnt over his career to date.

On 1 October 1999, I walked out of South Kensington tube station, fresh-faced and ready to start my PhD. 20 years later as I walk out of the same tube station to the same campus of the same university (still fresh-faced I like to think), the question is, have I learnt anything?

Spoiler alert – the answer is yes, but a guarded yes, from a staggeringly low starting point, like Marianas Trench low. Some of what I have learned is fairly niche and only useful if you work in a biomedical lab – like how to open a tightly screwed plastic tube with one hand whilst avoiding infecting yourself with influenza, some are a bit more generally applicable to having a career in science, especially if you are or want to run your own research group, and some grandiosely I think might be applicable to everyone.

School’s out

Working in a university, this may be a bit unnecessary to point out, but education never ends: we are continually learning and evolving. Even if you were able to recall all the facts from school into adulthood it is likely that they are now either outdated or completely irrelevant to the work you do. We need to retrain: to become parents, to become managers, to change roles, to retire gracefully. And for these new roles, there is no pass/fail test to say how well you have done, it is all a bit woolly. So we need effective strategies to learn for life: both for ourselves and for the others – students, children, co-workers – that we might need to train. (more…)

Nature wants you dead – here’s how vaccines work to help keep us all alive

 

Dr John Tregoning takes us on a tour of vaccination’s greatest successes, explaining how this incredible human achievement works to keep us all safer from disease – as long as we keep vaccinating ourselves and our families.

Nature wants you dead. Not just you, but your children and unborn children and everyone you have ever met.

It wants you to cough and sneeze and poop yourself into an early grave. If it can, it wants you your blood vessels to burst and pustules to explode all over your body. Put simply, Nature is trying to kill you.

And until relatively recently, it was really good at doing this. The average life expectancy of a human in 1900 was 31 years. I should already be dead.

But then science intervened with two critical innovations, clean water and vaccines, and changed everything. Clean water has had the biggest impact, but vaccines are a close second. (more…)

Reducing, refining and replacing the use of animals is crucial to respiratory research

Animal research

Dr John Tregoning explains how the use of animals in science is properly regulated and why it’s so important to respiratory research, which could impact millions of lives.

Respiratory infection is one of the main causes of disease and death throughout the world, claiming 3 million deaths worldwide in 2016. The symptoms range from the mild (a runny nose) to the extremely serious (pneumonia, hospitalisation and respiratory failure). These infections have a large economic burden both directly in medical costs and indirectly in working days lost. They also represent a potential risk for causing major pandemics; one hundred years ago the 1918 flu outbreak led to the death of 50-100 million people, significantly more than the whole First World War. There is a clear need to understand why we get sick after respiratory infections and critically we need new drugs to reduce the burden of disease. For example, there is an urgent need for a new influenza vaccine that could prevent future pandemics. (more…)

His job, her job: our kids

Dr Tregoning

Dr (John) Tregoning and Dr (Charlie) Tregoning discuss roadblocks and solutions to equality in childcare.

We have as a couple, tried and sometimes succeeded but most often failed to share parenting fairly. Drawing from our own experience and a very shallow skim read of how to books, here are what we consider to be some of the major problems to equality at home as two working parents and some possible solutions. This is not to say every parent should go back to work; do what is best for your own family, but remember to be honest with yourself about what you really want and include yourself in the ‘what is best for my family’ calculation. (more…)