Cosy Science presents: Inflammation with Dr Dean Willis

Inflammation has been recognised as a fundamental human response since antiquity but is only now that we are being to appreciate its ubiquitous role in disease. Inflammatory reactions are now not only implicated in asthma, arthritis and organ rejection but also contribute to metabolic diseases, Alzheimer’s, autism, aging and cancer. In this talk I will discuss how areas as diverse as art history, orphan diseases and complexity research are helping us understand inflammation. How inflammatory diseases represent the proving ground, and graveyard, for a range of therapeutic interventions like “the biologics” and “gene therapy”. And I will address the age-old question of why your grandmother knows more about inflammation than you do.


Dr. Dean Willis
After completing his PhD at the William Harvey Research Institute in London Dean undertook a research fellowship in Rheumatic Diseases at the same institute. He is currently a principal investigator at UCL. The focus of his lab’s research is cell signalling mechanisms in inflammatory diseases and the identification of therapeutic targets. He also has an interest in the mathematical modelling of disease and the drug discovery process.