Dr Sarah Dimeloe PhD

• PhD Immunology, 2012
• MSc Immunology, 2008
• MPharm Pharmacy, 2004

Sarah Dimeloe qualified with an MPharm (Hons) from the University of Nottingham in 2004. She completed her professional training as a pharmacist at Guy’s and St. Thomas’ NHS Foundation Trust and a PhD in Immunology at King’s College London.

In 2012 Sarah moved to the University of Basel in Switzerland to undertake post-doctoral research in the laboratory of Professor Christoph Hess. Here, Sarah began to investigate metabolic activity in T cells and how that relates to their important roles in health and disease. 

In 2017 Sarah was awarded a Birmingham Fellowship to establish her own research group at the University of Birmingham. Her research has subsequently been supported by a Leukeamia UK John Goldman Fellowship, European Commission Marie Curie Actions Fellowship, MRC New Investigator Research Grant and project grants from Blood Cancer UK. In 2024 Sarah was awarded a Lister Institute Prize Fellowship.

• MSc Immunology and Immunotherapy
• BSc Biomedical Science
• MBChB Medicine

Sarah currently supervises 2 PhD students and 1 MSc student

For any doctoral research enquiries, please email: s.k.dimeloe@bham.ac.uk

Research in Sarah’s laboratory focuses on the metabolism and interlinked immune function of immune cells in health and disease.

Metabolism describes how cells take up nutrients and break them down to provide energy and building blocks. This changes dramatically in immune cells when they become engaged in an immune response and is critical for their protective activity. Sarah’s lab aim to understand how this happens, and how it becomes dysregulated in diseases associated with altered immune cell function, including autoimmunity and cancer.

We are particularly interested in how the bone marrow environment impacts immune cell metabolism and protective activity in the blood cancer, multiple myeloma. We also study fundamental metabolic processes in immune cells, for example synthesis of the redox cofactor, NAD.

A recent research project investigated how an inflammatory cytokine (messenger molecule) promotes metabolic activity of T lymphocytes in rheumatoid arthritis. The article describing the results of this research can be accessed without access charges here:

https://www.science.org/stoken/author-tokens/ST-1867/full

(Bishop et al, TNF-α signals through ITK-Akt-mTOR to drive CD4+ T cell metabolic reprogramming, which is dysregulated in rheumatoid arthritis; Science Signaling; 2024; DOI: 10.1126/scisignal.adg5678)

Sarah is a member of the Wellcome Trust Career Development Award interview panel