Jelena Bezbradica Mirkovic

I am a Senior Research Fellow of the Kennedy Trust for Rheumatology Research (KTRR) and an MRC New Investigator at the University of Oxford.

My research goal is to elucidate mechanisms that control the initiation of inflammatory responses. Innate immune cells, such as macrophages and dendritic cells are sentinels of tissue homeostasis. Our group investigates how these cells integrate signals from cytokines (which report on infection or tissue injury) with signals from microbial and tissue-damage sensors to direct the most appropriate effector response.

The NLRP3 inflammasome is one such critical sensor of cell and tissue homeostasis that becomes activated in response to pathogen- or tissue-derived danger signals. While beneficial during infections, excessive and uncontrolled NLRP3 activity contributes to the development of several inherited and acquired inflammatory diseases. Hence, we study how the NLRP3 pathway activity is ‘turned on and off’ in healthy individuals to be able to harness this knowledge for therapeutic interventions.  

I earned my Ph.D. degree with Professor Sebastian Joyce at Vanderbilt University, USA. I continued my research training as a Damon Runyon Cancer Research Foundation and Howard Hughes Medical Institute postdoctoral fellow with Professor Ruslan Medzhitov at Yale University, USA, and with Professor Kate Schroder at The University of Queensland, Australia. I joined the Kennedy Institute in 2016.