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Marta E Polak is an Associate Director, Translational Sciences at Janssen & a visiting Professor of Systems Immunology at the University of Southampton. She is a biologist, bioinformatician and systems immunologist, investigating mechanisms of immune regulation to identify targets for therapeutic interventions. To address this research question directly in human tissues, Marta's group combined immunological, bioinformatic and computational approaches, and developed an in silico model for the molecular processes underpinning the immune decision making process. This cross-disciplinary approach allowed Marta's group to describe transcriptional programming and genome-wide chromatin landscape in primary human Langerhans cells and identified their unique dependence on IRF4 but not IRF8, key to preventing inflammation in the healthy epidermis. Transcriptional programming in human skin during exposure to antigens in ex vivo human challenge model, uncovered the rapid allergen-stimulated expansion of human cutaneous DCs and the role of balance between Th17 TNFa producing cells and antioxidant defences regulating skin inflammation.
The systems immunology approach has now also been successfully translated to studies in infectious diseases, identifying innate immune programming in blood dendritic cells induced by p.vivax during in vivo controlled challenge trials and novel therapeutic targets in TB granulomas, constructing gene-module based predictive model for stratification of COVID-19 outcome for unvaccinated patients, as well as in autoimmune disease and in cancer.
She obtained her doctorate at the University of Leiden, The Netherlands. In 2008, she moved to Southampton and joined the newly formed Innate Immunity Group. In 2016, she received a prestigious Sir Henry Dale Fellowship from Wellcome Trust and in 2022, following 20 years in academia, she has moved to Janssen, to take systems immunology analysis of immune regulation in human tissues to translation.