Exploiting digital histology approaches to probe the pathophysiology of SARS-CoV-2 infection

A University of Birmingham (UoB) graduate in Biochemistry, Kelly trained as a Biomedical Scientist in the private healthcare sector and went on to practice in NHS laboratories. Following an MSc Genomic Medicine at UoB, Kelly joined the emerging digital pathology service at the Advanced Therapies Facility at UoB. Here Kelly has been progressing staining, imaging and analytical methods on various platforms including the Leica Bond RX, Akoya Vectra Polaris 2, Nanostring GeoMx and Visiopharm, and bolstered by a recent WT MUE award has been involved in establishing and managing the Molecular Histology Facility.
During this time the facility has established a number of strategic partnerships including Global Priority Site and Key Account with Nanostring, Key Opinion Leader with Akoya, Reference Site with Visiopharm and other collaborations including Leica Biosystems.

Graham Taylor is a senior lecturer in viral and cancer immunology at the University of Birmingham, UK. His research group studies the immunology of Epstein-Barr virus (EBV), a common human herpesvirus infection linked to multiple diseases including 2% of cancers worldwide. His group have started to apply high dimensional analytical techniques to studies the virology and immunology of EBV diseases. These include mass cytometry to characterise immune cells in the blood, high-plex cytokine analysis of plasma and, most recently, high-plex immunohistochemistry to study tissue samples.

During the SARS-CoV2 pandemic Graham's research group, in collaboration with Prof. Paul Murray's group at the University of Limerick, have studied different virus-related diseases. These include: i) Multisystem inflammatory Syndrome of Children (MIS-C, also known as PIMS-TS) that develops in few children infected by the virus, and ii) COVID-19. For the latter his group have deployed a wide range of complementary techniques on post-mortem tissue samples.