Biography

Gavin Screaton was appointed to the Chair of Medicine at Imperial College in 2004. In 2013 he became the Vice Dean of Academic Development moving on the Dean of Faculty of Medicine in 2015.

Gavin Screaton received his first degree from Cambridge in 1984 before moving on to Oxford to complete his medical studies in 1987. He then completed training in General Internal Medicine and obtained a DPhil from Oxford University in 1998. His research, which has been supported by a series of Fellowships awarded by the MRC and Wellcome Trust, has covered a variety of topics from control of RNA processing and apoptosis to immunology. The current interests of his laboratory revolve around the immunology of infectious diseases with a special interest in dengue haemorrhagic fever, where his research is currently funded by the MRC and Wellcome Trust (through a Senior Investigator Award), with active research collaborations in South-East Asia.

Gavin Screaton is a Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences & the Royal College of Physicians, a member of the Association of Physicians, the MRC Strategy Board & the prestigious Henry Kunkel Society. He was also made a Founder Senior Investigator in the National Institute for Health Research. He has sat on funding committees at the Cancer Research UK, the Wellcome Trust and the MRC.

His early research concentrated on alternative RNA splicing, having first mapped one of the most extensively spliced human genes, CD44, that contains a tandem array of ten alternatively spliced exons. He went on to clone a number of alternative splicing factors, SRp30c, SRp40, SRp55 and a splicing repressor SRp30e. With colleagues at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory he made a significant contribution in this area.

Later on he focused on immunology and for some time studied factors involved in life and death decisions in lymphocytes. He contributed to an understanding of Fas ligand in lymphocyte apoptosis, showing that blocking CD8 co receptor signaling in MHC I recognition could dissociate lymphocyte degranulation and activation induced cell death. He studied the potential role of Fas ligand upregulation by HIV as an immune evasion strategy and the use of Fas ligand to enhance tumour immunity. He also cloned three new members of the TNF receptor family TRICK2 (DR5), LIT (DcR2) and LARD (DR3) and elucidated the crystal structure of one DR5 bound to its ligand TRAIL.

Latterly Gavin Screaton has focused his research on immunology and immunopathology of infectious diseases including HIV, SARS and Dengue. Dengue is where the greatest contributions have been made, firstly, in studying the role of the T cell response to virus in promoting immunopathology; he showed a role for original antigenic sin in secondary dengue infections. His contribution to this field has recently been extended to the study of the human antibody response where a significant fraction of antibodies respond to a low abundance surface antigen, pre-membrane protein, rather than neutralize infection these antibodies may actually drive higher virus replication.