Research themes
T-cell biology, Thymus and T-cell development, T-cell Tolerance and Immunity.
Research activity
Graham Anderson is Professor of Experimental Immunology at The University of Birmingham. His research focus is thymus biology, and has published over 160 peer-reviewed research articles in this field. Early in his career, he established new approaches to study thymus function within defined three-dimensional reaggregate cultures. This resulted in a landmark publication in 1993 in ‘Nature’, and in 2022 this was highlighted by The Journal of Immunology in their ‘Pillars in Immunology’ series. This experimental system is now used worldwide as a cornerstone technique of thymus research.
Following a Wellcome Fellowship, Graham was appointed as an independent group leader in in 1994. He continued to work on specialization of thymic stroma for T-cell development, including identifying unique properties of the thymic cortex for positive selection (J. Exp. Med. 1994). The discovery that fibroblasts influence thymic epithelial progenitors (J. Exp. Med. 2003) opened up new research directions with stromal crosstalk as a focus. In 2005, Graham was appointed Professor of T-cell Biology at the MRC Centre for Immune Regulation. In 2006 in ‘Nature’, he provided the first description of a new progenitor cell type that generates both cortical and medullary thymic areas. In 2007 in J. Exp. Med., he showed the Tumor Necrosis Receptor Superfamily member RANK controls thymus medulla formation and tolerance induction. This first demonstration of innate immune regulation during development of a primary lymphoid organ provided a molecular explanation for lymphostromal crosstalk in thymus. In 2012, these ideas were further developed in an ‘Immunity’ paper describing the importance of T-cells in thymus development, and helped form an emerging concept of innate/adaptive immune interplay.
Most recently, his studies highlight how thymic epithelial subtypes regulate qualitatively different T-cell subsets (Nature Comms. 2020), and control pregnancy success (Nature 2020). Finally, his work identifying an intra-thymic innate cell network that drives thymus regeneration (Science Immunology 2022), and selective failures in thymus function post bone marrow transplant (J. Exp. Med. 2022), offer clinically tractable targets to effective immune reconstitution.