Charlotte Rich-Griffin

What is your research background?

The core theme of my research to date has been “single-cell omics”. My PhD research involved one of the first attempts applying single cell technologies to plants (Arabidopsis thaliana) in order to investigate plant immunity at a single cell level. After my PhD, I moved to Oxford and made the jump into human immunology researching cancer-specific T cells with Tao Dong and Hashem Koohy. My work focused on integrating TCR repertoire information with gene expression in order to identify cancer specific subsets of T cells. Since joining the Dendrou group in early 2020, I have been analysing single cell experiments to understand how immune cell composition and function can be resolved at the single-cell level in primary human tissues to help inform therapeutic strategies. I has been involved in projects Multiple Sclerosis and Inflammatory Bowel Disease. I am also heavily involved in the COVID-19 Multi-modal Blood ATlas (COMBAT) project which aimed to understand the heterogeneity of COVID responses using a PBMC blood atlas from patients with different severities of COVID-19.

What are you researching now?

The theme of single cell analysis of  immune mediated inflammatory disorders (IMIDs) will be continued in my work as one of the Oxford-Janssen fellows on the Cartography project.  We will use cutting-edge single cell techniques  create a cross-disease, cross-tissue cell atlas of IMIDs. As a computational biologist, I will be focussed on analysing and interpreting the data from the multi-modal single cell assays.

What are your aspirations for the future of this research?

Cartography will create a cross-disease, cross-tissue cell atlas of IMIDs combining multi-omic single-cell analysis, functional studies and clinical phenotyping across multiple IMIDs (gastroenterology, dermatology, rheumatology). This atlas will be then used to inform potential drug targets in collaboration with Janssen.