Immune modulation and the innate immune response – salutary lessons from Covid vaccination.

Professor Angus Dalgleish - Professor of Oncology at the Infection and Immunity Research Institute, St. George’s University, London.

Biography

Professor Angus Dalgleish was appointed as foundation chair of oncology at St George’s, University of London in 1991. He graduated MBBS at University College, London, in 1974, having done an intercalated BSc in anatomy with Professor J Z Young, FRS. After training as a general physician and specialist medical oncologist he joined Professor Robin Weiss, then head of the Institute of Cancer Research as a clinical research fellow in 1984. His project was on human retroviruses and he was a co-discoverer of the fact that HIV used CD4 as a receptor and senior author of the paper that first linked HIV infection to slim disease in East Africa.

In 1987 he became a Medical Research Council clinical research fellow at the Northwick Park Clinical Research Centre. Here he continued his work on HIV pathogenesis and became part of an EU group focused on the correlates of immune protection.

Professor Angus Dalgleish trained at University College Hospital London, and in Brisbane and Sydney. He returned to the U.K. in 1984 and undertook a thesis on retroviruses with Robert Weiss. He was appointed as Senior Clinical Scientist at the MRC Clinical Research Centre, Northwick Park where he pursued his interests in HIV pathogenesis and the potential of Thalidomide to treat chronic disease. His suggestion that analogues of Thalidomide could lead to enhancement of the therapeutic activity and reduction of the side effects led to the licensing of Revlimid (Lenalidomide) and Pomalidomide (Pomalyst) for myeloma and lymphoma by Celgene. He was awarded the Joshua Lederberg prize in 2011 in recognition of this work.

Since 2001 he has been the Principal of the Institute for Cancer Vaccines and Immunotherapy. Dalgleish’s 517 publications have been published by Nature, Science, Cell and other key journals. They have been cited >20,000 times, H-index 63 (web of science).