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Gillian Griffiths is Professor of Immunology and Cell Biology and Wellcome Principal Research Fellow at Cambridge University. She is Fellow of Royal Society, winner of the Buchanan Medal and she was the Director of Cambridge Institute for Medical Research between 2012-2017.
She began her scientific career at University College London by studying immunology. She continued in the subject, undertaking her PhD at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge supervised by Nobel Prize winner César Milstein. Griffiths was one of the first to show that immune cells have specialised mechanisms of secretion, and identified proteins and mechanisms that control cytotoxic T lymphocyte secretion.
Her research lies at the interface between cell biology and immunology. Her lab has been using insights from human genetic disorders to understand the cell biology of cytotoxic T lymphocytes, immune cells that destroy cancerous and virally infected cells. Her work has revealed new concepts in both immunology and cell biology by identifying important parallels between biological systems. These include the observations that many cells of the immune system use lysosomes as secretory organelles, and that their polarised secretion involves a unique role for the centrosome that closely mimics centrosome polarisation during ciliogenesis. These findings not only link the fields of immunology, cell and developmental biology but provide new avenues for understanding molecular mechanisms relevant to health and disease, providing the foundations for the development of targeted cancer immunotherapy.