Scientific Advisory Board

John Isaacs, BSc (Hon), MBBS, PhD, FRCP

Professor Isaacs is Deputy Director of the NIHR Newcastle Biomedical Research Centre in Ageing and Long-Term Conditions, and leads the Musculoskeletal Disease research theme. He is Director of Therapeutics North East at Newcastle University’s Institute for Cellular Medicine and Professor of Clinical Rheumatology. Additionally he is Honorary Consultant Rheumatologist with the Newcastle upon Tyne Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust. John is an academic lead in the NIHR Joint and Related Inflammatory Diseases Translational Research Collaboration.

He is internationally renowned as a pioneer of translational rheumatoid arthritis (RA) research with particular interest in immunological therapies and therapeutic tolerance induction. His research group performs early phase experimental medicine studies, often using products developed in-house. His research team recently developed, and performed a phase 1 study of, tolerogenic dendritic cells in patients with inflammatory arthritis.

James T. Rosenbaum, MD

James T. Rosenbaum has spent more than 30 years studying ocular inflammatory disease including animal models of uveitis.

His research interests are complemented by his direction of a clinic devoted to patients with ocular inflammatory diseases including uveitis, scleritis, orbital inflammation, and steroid sensitive optic neuropathy.

He has authored nearly 600 peer reviewed papers or book chapters. He has been honoured by the American College of Rheumatology, the Canadian Rheumatology Association, the German Ophthalmology Society, the Association for Research in Vision and Ophthalmology and by the International Uveitis Study Group Eye Foundation with some of  their highest awards.

Iain McInnes, CBE, FRSE, FMedSci

One of the leading figures in global research into rheumatoid and psoriatic arthritis, Professor McInnes has been widely published – his work has been hugely influential in driving new approaches and treatments for inflammatory diseases.

He is Director of the Institute of Infection, Immunity and Inflammation at the University of Glasgow. He is an authority on the pathogenesis and treatment of inflammatory arthritis. His early studies identified the expression and functional importance of a number of cytokines in rheumatoid synovitis and have extended since to explore the pathways that drive inflammation in the skin and joints of people with psoriatic arthritis. Latterly he has developed a substantial programme investigating the mechanisms and treatment of common co-morbidities e.g. heart disease and lipid disorders, that afflict people with arthritis.

Professor McInnes has built an internationally recognised research programme that aims to understand the cellular and molecular pathways behind the development of inflammatory joint diseases. In particular, his research advances have provided a platform for major pharmaceutical companies to develop pre-clinical findings into clinical trials of innovative therapies. Finally, he is heavily engaged in the concepts and evolutions of precision medicine principles in rheumatology.

Among a number of international awards, Professor McInnes was awarded the Sir James Black Prize Medal by the Royal Society of Edinburgh for his “outstanding contribution to the field of immunology” and received the Carol-Nachman Prize in 2019. 

Sebastiaan J Vastert, MD, PhD

Bas Vastert is a pediatric rheumatologist in the Wilhelmina Children’s Hospital Utrecht. He obtained his PhD on mechanisms of disease and therapy in severe Juvenile Idiopathic Arthritis in 2013. From 2013, he started a translational research line in the laboratory of translational immunology and from 2017 he joined forces with Jorg van Loosdregt to co-head the van Loosdregt-Vastert group within the Laboratory of Translational Immunology in UMC Utrecht, focusing on novel therapeutic strategies in JIA through translation of cutting edge basic science into clinical benefit.

In 2016 Bas organized, together with Klaus Tenbrock (Aachen, Germany), a fund raising bicycling tour, from Utrecht (Netherlands) to Genua (Italy). The UCAN Ride for Arthritis (UCANR4A.eu) boosted international research collaboration, raised > 30,000 euro on private donations and received major media attention (local as well as national) in the Netherlands, Germany, Switzerland and Italy.

Within the LTI the van Loosdregt-Vastert group is continuously exploring possibilities to translate basic science into clinical benefit for patients with chronic inflammatory disorders like JIA. Currently, they are leading a multi-center, nationwide prospective trial implementing a biomarker driven stop-strategy for rIL-1RA therapy in systemic JIA patients in the Netherlands, funded by ZonMW. Moreover, they are initiating a clinical trial studying the potential of Nicotinamide (vitamin B3) in therapeutic strategies for non-systemic JIA.

Oliver Stegle, PhD

Oliver Stegle is the Head of the Computational Gemonics and Systems Genetics Division at the German Cancer Research Center (DKFZ) and group leader at EMBL in Heidelberg, Germany. His group’s main interest lies in computational methods to unravel the genotype-phenotype map on a genome-wide scale. To address this, the team carries out research at the interface of statistical inference, machine learning and computational biology. They have pioneered computational methods for integrating large and heterogeneous datasets across individual and at the single-cell level. The methods and models they develop allow for tying together molecular changes with genetic variation and disease phenotypes and are applied in the context of important studies. Their most recent advances are in the area of single-cell genomics, deriving approaches for both interpreting conventional single-cell RNA-seq variability as well as for the analysis of data from spatial technologies. A current direction in the lab is to extend the boundaries of single-cell analysis to integrate single-cell RNA-seq with somatic mutations and clonal substructure in tissues. Oliver obtained his PhD from the University of Cambridge in Physics in 2009 and worked as a postdoc at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems in Tubingen. He was a group leader at the EMBL European Bioinformatics before moving to the Heidelberg in 2018, where he obtained a full professorship (W3) at Heidelberg University in 2020. He has received serval recognitions, coordinates the ELLIS Health program and is an European Research investigator. 

Benjamin Fairfax BM BCh, MRCP, PhD

Benjamin Fairfax is a practising Academic Medical Oncologist with an interest in the genetic determinants of immune responses. He is based in the Department of Oncology at the MRC Weatherall Institute for Molecular Medicine in Oxford where he is an Associate Professor. His group’s main avenue of research is understanding the determinants of response to immune checkpoint blockade in the treatment of cancer, with a focus on genetic contribution to clinical outcomes as well as the development of autoimmune toxicity including rheumatological complications. A significant proportion of patients receiving checkpoint immunotherapy develop arthritis – how this iatrogenic joint inflammation relates to classical arthritides is poorly understood. His group focuses solely on human immunology and employs both immunological and bioinformatic approaches. Other key research avenues include context-specific expression quantitative trait loci and the modulation of DNA methylation by inflammation.