John Tregoning
London
Professor of Vaccine Immunology
Author of science books
'A Wise and Witty Scientist'
Tweets my opinion
Rep'd @LittleHardman
Publisher @OneworldNews
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Articles by John Tregoning
Przetestował wszystkie sposoby na długowieczność. Profesor: odkryłem sekret dobrego życia
"Dałem sobie zbadać geny". Profesor mówi, czego się o sobie dowiedział Umrzesz. Tak samo jak ja i wszyscy, których kiedykolwiek spotkałeś. To zapewne nie są wiadomości zdrowotne, które chciałbyś usłyszeć (…) Ale śmierć to nieunikniona prawda. Pozostaje tylko pytanie: jak i kiedy? Czytaj nas częściej w Google Zbliżając się do czterdziestki, te pytania — kiedy umrę i na co? — zyskały (podobnie jak ja) większy ciężar.
Tuning intracellular immunity by Nodamura virus B2 protein enhances self-amplifying RNA activity
Abstract Self-amplifying RNA (saRNA) offers a powerful approach for vaccine development, as its replicative nature within cells provides prolonged antigen expression together with self-adjuvanticity. However, its potency is often limited by innate immune responses, particularly those triggered by intracellular double-stranded RNA (dsRNA), highlighting the need for strategies that can boost saRNA efficacy without compromising its immunostimulatory properties.
Is the scientific paper still a fraud?
In 1963, Nobel Prize-winning immunologist Peter Medawar presented a controversial idea on BBC radio, that the scientific paper was a fraud [1]. But he did not mean it in the way you might think. Scientific fraud does happen (both then and now), but he meant something more fundamental about the format of the scientific paper. His argument was that the structure of papers tells a false story about how science is done.
Procrastination, productivity and inspiration: how research is like designing video games
Bennett Foddy says research can be creative, like game design.Credit: Gabriel Cuzzillo I am a vaccine-immunology researcher and, since childhood, an enthusiastic (but mostly talentless) amateur gamer. I have an enduring love for the text-based adventure games I played in the 1980s, as well as for classics from the 1990s and early 2000s, such as Doom, Half Life and Grand Theft Auto III.
Noncanonical amino acids enable plug and play vaccine platform in the ALiCE cell free system
Abstract Non-canonical amino acids (ncaas) are increasingly used in vaccinology to improve vaccine adaptability and immunogenicity. Cell-free protein synthesis (CFPS) offers a promising route for site-specific ncaa incorporation, but conventional prokaryotic CFPS systems show limitations to produce complex proteins requiring post-translational modifications while eukaryotic systems have historically been difficult to scale and show low protein yields.
Science funding needs fixing - but not through chaotic reforms
The UK science ecosystem is in limbo. On 1 February, the country’s national science-funding agency, UK Research and Innovation (UKRI), announced large changes to how research grants will be judged and awarded. Although the precise details are still emerging, the UKRI open letter states an aim to “focus and do fewer things better” (see go.nature.com/4rnhghn). Support for curiosity-driven research will be preserved, we are told.
Public-speaking tips from the experts: what scientists can learn from comics, musicians and actors
Scientists don’t need to be superstar public performers like Taylor Swift, but they can learn from show business.Credit: Carlos Alvarez/Getty for TAS Rights Management You’re at a conference. The lights are low, it’s the last speaker of the day, engagement has hit rock bottom and the audience completely tunes out. Phones come out and everyone is running the clock down; the speaker even apologizes for getting in the way of the networking drinks.
Comparative cross-species transcriptomics during RSV infection identifies targets to treat RSV disease
Keywords RSV Transcriptome IL-17 Mouse Infection Lung human challenge Introduction Respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) is the primary cause of severe lower respiratory tract infection (LRTI) among infants and young children globally.
Hope Sings Eternal: Can Listening to Music Help you Cheat Death?
The narrative around extending life has been overtaken by a weird cabal of billionaire techbros, who appear to treat it like a video game where the goal is to get 100% completion, rather than to try, as much as possible, to enjoy the experience and process of ageing.
Non-invasive in vivo sensing of bacterial implant infection using catalytically-optimised gold nanocluster-loaded liposomes for urinary readout - Nature Communications
Abstract Staphylococcus aureus is a leading cause of nosocomial implant-associated infections, causing significant morbidity and mortality, underscoring the need for rapid, non-invasive, and cost-effective diagnostics. Here, we optimise the synthesis of renal-clearable gold nanoclusters (AuNCs) for enhanced catalytic activity with the aim of developing a sensitive colourimetric diagnostic for bacterial infection.
Exploiting human immune repertoire transgenic mice for protective monoclonal antibodies against antimicrobial resistant Acinetobacter baumannii - Nature Communications
Abstract The use of monoclonal antibodies for the control of drug resistant nosocomial bacteria may alleviate a reliance on broad spectrum antimicrobials for treatment of infection. We identify monoclonal antibodies that may prevent infection caused by carbapenem resistant Acinetobacter baumannii.
Systemic prime mucosal boost significantly increases protective efficacy of bivalent RSV influenza viral vectored vaccine - npj Vaccines
Abstract Although licensed vaccines against influenza virus have been successful in reducing pathogen-mediated disease, they have been less effective at preventing viral infection of the airways and current seasonal updates to influenza vaccines do not always successfully accommodate viral drift. Most licensed influenza and recently licensed RSV vaccines are administered via the intramuscular route.
How Dark Souls and Darth Revan helped me to make sense of my professorship
In September I got promoted to full professor. Achieving this long-sought career goal led me to reflect on what advice I could share with others hoping to do something similar. As a lifelong gamer, I realized that academia is not dissimilar to open-world role-playing video games. In this type of game, the player has complete control over what happens (as seen in the Grand Theft Auto series, for example), rather than just playing as the protagonist, who follows a pre-set path (as in The Last of Us).
Nobel goes to 2 scientists who worked on mRNA shots
Discoveries led to creation of covid vaccine and will be put to more use Two scientists won the Nobel Prize in medicine on Monday for discoveries that enabled the creation of mRNA vaccines against covid-19 that were critical in slowing the pandemic — technology that’s also being studied to fight cancer and other diseases.
Can we save lives by deliberately infecting people?
In the middle of the pandemic, scientists intentionally infected healthy volunteers with SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19. John Tregoning, Reader in Respiratory Infections at the Department of Infectious Disease, explains why these experiments, and the volunteers who take part in them, are critical to modern medicine. In early March 2021, in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic, a surprising-sounding set of experiments were taking place.
Respiratory syncytial virus after the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic — what next? - Nature Reviews Immunology
Respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) is a major cause of lower respiratory tract infection. It is a large contributor to infant hospitalization and also has a substantial burden in older adults ( ≥ 65 years). The non-pharmaceutical interventions that were introduced to limit the spread of SARS-CoV-2 have had a marked effect on the transmission of RSV, particularly its seasonality. Here, we consider the implications of these changes to RSV transmission for future prevention strategies.
‘Infectious’: Why don’t we fall sick from all the pathogens around us?
I want you to take a deep breath. Have you done it? Good. You just breathed in about half a litre of air. It is possible to capture the liquid in your breath by cooling it down – a bit like when you breathe on a cold mirror. If you do this, over one minute you can recover 100 microlitres of fluid (about the size of a lentil). If you then grow what you recover from that fluid you get between 100 and 10,000 bacteria, 5,000 viruses and one or two fungi.
Progress of the COVID-19 vaccine effort: viruses, vaccines and variants versus efficacy, effectiveness and escape - Nature Reviews Immunology
How do the vaccines protect? What is the role of T cells in protection? Is there an easily measurable correlate of protection that can be used for future licensure? Is antibody-mediated protection due to mechanisms other than virus neutralization? What roles do IgA and mucosal immunity have in protection? What kind of protection do the vaccines provide? Do the vaccines only prevent disease, or can they also prevent transmission or even asymptomatic infection?
Coronavirus diaries: the COVID 19
Credit: Adapted from Getty There I was exactly one year ago, on 24 March 2020, in the gaps between home-schooling and ‘home baking’, wondering what on Earth I should do with my time while my laboratory was shut. In the absence of pipettes, the main thing available to me was writing. I’ve enjoyed writing since my undergraduate days, and I’d done a few pieces on scientific life here and there — but these had been a sideshow, not the main event.
Coronavirus diaries: Laughter is the best medicine
Credit: Adapted from Getty Sometimes, all that’s left to do is to laugh. Stories from the First World War are riddled with gallows humour. In one apocryphal tale from the trenches, a bagpiper starts to pipe to raise morale. Fearing that the skirling sound of the pipes signals an imminent attack, the enemy shoot from their own trench, forcing everyone to take cover and the piper to stop playing. Eventually, the shooting subsides and the piper starts again, triggering the same set of events.
Coronavirus diaries: making plans in a changing world
Credit: Adapted from Getty Planning: it’s what we scientists do. Every experiment needs to be thought through in advance. The depth of planning will vary from field to field. A small pilot study that I might do in my immunology laboratory, for example, requires less forethought than does a field trip involving the UK polar-research submersible Boaty McBoatface. This need for planning means scientists tend to have the ‘careful, thinking ahead’ phenotype.
Coronavirus diaries: an unexpected career experiment
Credit: Adapted from Getty In March, every single aspect of my scientific working life shut down. This was incredibly disruptive. But looking back, it has given me an opportunity to look at different parts of my job in isolation. Taking everything away and then rebuilding from scratch, piece by piece, has allowed me to appreciate the things I most need to be able to do my job and be happy doing it.
Coronavirus diaries: Reasons to be cheerful, 1, 2, 3
Credit: Adapted from Getty So, we are still here, still grinding our way through the COVID-19 pandemic. I am writing this during the second lockdown in England: around a month ago, I wrote that lockdown had largely lifted where I am, but that didn’t last long. Lockdown is a bit different this time; crucially, schools and universities are still open to some extent, which means my working life is closer to the good old days (of February 2020).
Coronavirus diaries: a new year for science
Credit: Adapted from Getty Last month in the United Kingdom, we entered the promised land when my children, after a 150-day absence, returned to their school in London. As with most much-anticipated events, except perhaps an end to the pandemic, it didn’t quite live up to expectations. The first change was the silence in my house.
First human efficacy study of a plant-derived influenza vaccine
In The Lancet, Brian Ward and colleagues report two efficacy studies that are, to the best of my knowledge, the first randomised phase 3 trials of a plant-derived quadrivalent influenza vaccine. 1 Ward BJ Makarkov A Séguin A et al. Efficacy, immunogenicity, and safety of a plant-derived, quadrivalent, virus-like particle influenza vaccine in adults (18–64 years) and older adults (≥65 years): two multicentre, randomised phase 3 trials.
Coronavirus diaries: give your brain a break from science busywork, it deserves it
Credit: Adapted from Getty After months of lockdown and further months of not-quite-lockdown-but-not-back-to-normal, I’ve been on a holiday. And not like the fake holiday that I had before, but a real, going-away holiday. I went to Cornwall in South West England, where, once upon a time, my ancestors mined for tin, hence my impossible to pronounce surname; it might also explain why I chose a career that requires you to spend long periods in the dark, figuratively at least.
Coronavirus diaries: social media in an unsocial age
Credit: Adapted from Getty In the absence of seeing friends and colleagues in person, I’ve been turning a lot more to social media. Under lockdown, this is one of the few ways to stay in contact. I have used WhatsApp and Facebook to connect with friends, and Twitter and LinkedIn for loosely work-related discussions. It’s good to be able to interact with people while staying physically distant, but online social media can be difficult.
Coronavirus diaries: a lockdown letter to myself as a PhD student
Credit: Adapted from Getty One thing’s for certain: thanks to Coronavirus Lockdown, I have less time to spend on work now than I did six months ago. Once the ‘essential’ meetings are done for the day, there is very limited time to do the research part of my job. But even that limited time has trickled away. This is reflected in the list I wrote a few weeks ago about what I had done during lockdown — there was a lot of not-work on there.
Coronavirus diaries: back to the lab again
Credit: Adapted from Getty After my grant application was rejected, I needed something to cheer me up. I found it in three crucial words in the ‘Going to work’ section of the UK government’s catchily titled document ‘Staying alert and safe (social distancing)’, published on 11 May. The words in question were “and scientific research”.
Coronavirus diaries: taking leave, but not holiday
Credit: Adapted from Getty So here we are, nine weeks on, and workwise nothing has changed since the start of the UK lockdown. There have been a few minor social differences: depending on which of the four UK countries you are in, you are now allowed to have a cup of tea at a 2-metre distance with up to either six or eight people (or more as long as they’re from no more than two households). But this hasn’t materially shaped how I am having to do my job.
Coronavirus diaries: rejection under lockdown
Credit: Adapted from Getty This week’s been tough. That swine, reviewer 2, reached out his long arm and slapped down one of my grants. This was a big application that had taken six months to bring together. Rejection under normal circumstances is grim. Rejection on top of everything else at the moment is brutal. The bad news tipped me into a full-on tantrum. Ten days after the news, I have rebalanced somewhat.
Coronavirus diaries: finding a place to have new ideas
CAREER COLUMN 22 May 2020 John Tregoning finds inspiration in conferences, music and running. John Tregoning John Tregoning is a reader in respiratory infections in the Department of Infectious Disease, Imperial College London, UK. He runs a blog on academic life. Credit: Adapted from Getty One of my shorter-lived delusions at the beginning of lockdown was that it would be a fantastic time to write grant proposals.
Coronavirus diaries: We’ll meet again
Credit: Adapted from Getty I was fortunate enough to go into the laboratory recently — on vaccine-related coronavirus research that we hope might inform studies about the minimum dose of vaccine that can be used. This research is very much a tiny cog in a huge global wheel. By the time I had aliquoted the third tube of colourless liquid, I realized that it wasn’t the lab work that I missed while working from home — it was the people.
Coronavirus diaries: All the things we do not do
Being cooped up at home comes with a lot of challenges, but don’t overlook the benefits — such as wearing cosy slippers and quick naps on the couch.Credit: Adapted from Getty So, we’re five weeks in. Looking back, some of these diary entries might come across as a bit negative. For what it’s worth: I know I am lucky, both in my normal life and during the lockdown. Perhaps I shouldn’t be complaining as much as I have in these pages.
Coronavirus diaries: creature comforts
Credit: Adapted from Getty Like most people’s, my working life at the moment is far from normal. It’s not so much the working from home — it’s the never leaving home. I miss the familiar surroundings of work, especially my plants. I have lived in my current house for 10 years; I have worked at Imperial College London for more than 20 years, 15 of which have been on the St Mary’s campus in Paddington.
Coronavirus diaries: school’s out forever
Credit: Adapted from Getty For the record, the three people whom I would choose to be stuck with in the same house for 4 weeks (and counting) are my wife and two children (aged 10 and 12), and if it was just a prolonged holiday with no responsibilities, it would be wonderful. Unfortunately, we all still have work to do — whether it’s grants to write or a space-exploration school curriculum to study.
Coronavirus diaries: to be a scientist
Credit: Adapted from Getty For me, one of the biggest things to come to terms with, as I’m locked down in the United Kingdom, is not being able to go to my lab or my office at Imperial College, London. I realized the extent to which I was missing work when I told my children to get the ice cream from the freezer in the lab, actually meaning the garage — my subconscious speaking volumes.
Coronavirus diaries: hello from home
Credit: Adapted from Getty Twenty years after starting my PhD and 12 years into running my own research group, focusing on respiratory infections, at Imperial College London, I would describe myself as a mid-career scientist. With the job title of reader (somewhere between an associate and full professor), I’m seen as impossibly old by my PhD students, and as a relative newbie by the more senior profs. Of course, that was under normal circumstances.
Pregnancy has a minimal impact on the acute transcriptional signature to vaccination
Abstract Vaccination in pregnancy is an effective tool to protect both the mother and infant; vaccines against influenza, pertussis and tetanus are currently recommended. A number of vaccines with a specific indication for use in pregnancy are in development, with the specific aim of providing passive humoral immunity to the newborn child against pathogens responsible for morbidity and mortality in young infants.
Ten Simple Rules to becoming a principal investigator
Loading metrics Citation: Tregoning JS, McDermott JE (2020) Ten Simple Rules to becoming a principal investigator. PLoS Comput Biol 16(2): e1007448. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1007448 Editor: Fran Lewitter, Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research, UNITED STATES Published: February 20, 2020 This is an open access article, free of all copyright, and may be freely reproduced, distributed, transmitted, modified, built upon, or otherwise used by anyone for any lawful purpose.
Antiviral Immune Response as a Trigger of FUS Proteinopathy in Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis
Highlights • Viral infection or its mimic induce large, persistent assemblies of mutant FUS • These assemblies sequester optineurin and nucleocytoplasmic transport factors • Mutant FUS-expressing cells are hypersensitive to virus-induced toxicity • Type I interferon induced by viral infections promotes accumulation of FUS protein Summary Mutations in the FUS gene cause familial amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS-FUS).
how vaccines work to help keep us all alive
Dr John Tregoning takes us on a tour of vaccination’s greatest successes, explaining how this incredible human achievement works to keep us all safer from disease – as long as we keep vaccinating ourselves and our families. Nature wants you dead. Not just you, but your children and unborn children and everyone you have ever met. It wants you to cough and sneeze and poop yourself into an early grave. If it can, it wants you your blood vessels to burst and pustules to explode all over your body.
Turn off your e-mail and social media to get more done
We are all busy, seemingly all the time, with a never-ending stream of e-mails to answer and meetings to attend. But are there better ways to do busy? Cal Newport, in his book Deep Work (Piatkus, 2016), says “yes”. Here’s what I’ve learnt from him. Newport argues that, in the new world of work, the only thing we have to sell is our capacity to think rather than our capacity to do.
How will you judge me if not by impact factor?
Rumours among junior faculty members are that reports of the death of the impact factor are greatly exaggerated. In a round of funding earlier this year, my research output was described as being in “high-impact journals” by one reviewer and in “middle-tier journals” by another, with knock-on effects on their grant scores. It is not unheard of for people to be told that the only articles that count are the ones in journals with an impact factor that is over an arbitrary value.
From parade ground to PI
At the end of my postdoc, I excelled at moving tiny amounts of colorless fluid from one tube to another at strange times of day, and I had a vague sense of where I wanted to go scientifically. But my experience in the lab wasn't sufficient to equip me to run my own group. That preparation came from my double life as a British Army Reserve officer.
From parade ground to principal investigator
At the end of my postdoc, I excelled at moving tiny amounts of colorless fluid from one tube to another at strange times of day, and I had a vague sense of where I wanted to go scientifically. But my experience in the lab wasn’t sufficient to equip me to run my own group. That preparation came from my double life as a British Army Reserve officer.
No researcher is too junior to fix science
Nature | Column: World View Sharing Thousands of researchers took to the streets last month to march for science. It is time to channel this energy into shaping scientific culture. We all love to complain how the system for doing science thwarts ideal practice. Researchers reap more rewards for publishing flashy papers than for doing solid work, and the two do not always align. Everyone ends up chasing trends and asking the same questions.
Inflammatory Responses to Influenza Vaccination at the Extremes of Age
Age affects the immune response to vaccination, with individuals at the extremes of age responding poorly. The initial inflammatory response to antigenic materials shapes the subsequent adaptive response and so understanding is required about the effect of age on the profile of acute inflammatory mediators. In this study we measured the local and systemic inflammatory response after influenza vaccination or infection in neonatal, young adult and aged mice.
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