Clare Bryant, MA, BSc, BVetMed, Ph.D., MRCVS

Professor of Innate Immunity
Departments of Medicine and Veterinary Medicine
Director, NIH Oxford-Cambridge Scholars Programme (Cambridge, UK)

Prof. Clare Bryant graduated in biochemistry before training as a veterinary surgeon in London. She was funded by the Wellcome Trust for her Ph.D. (in London) before moving to work with Professor Sir John Vane at the William Harvey Research Institute for 4 years as a Wellcome postdoctoral fellow. She then moved to Cambridge as a Wellcome Trust Career Development Fellow where she is now Professor of Innate Immunity with laboratories in the Departments of Medicine and Veterinary Medicine. Her research group uses multidisciplinary approaches to understand how zoonotic bacteria are detected by the host (through Pattern Recognition Receptors (PRRs) including Toll-like receptors and inflammasomes), but also studies how PRR recognition of allergen proteins or toxic proteins produced by patients link to chronic inflammatory diseases such as Alzheimer’s and chronic allergic airway disease.

The Bryant lab has extensive collaborations with academia and industry which underpins all of their research. They collaborate closely with academics in the USA, Europe, and Australia to stay at the cutting edge of innate immunity research. A vital part of their work is to forge, and maintain, strong collaborations with the pharmaceutical industry to translate their research into medicines. This includes close links to Genentech (Dr. Bryant was a visiting professor there in 2016 and 2017) and she was seconded (part-time) to GSK in Stevenage as part of their Immunology Catalyst program for 3 years to forge stronger links with academia. Dr. Bryant and Prof. David Klenerman also have a drug discovery program with Apollo Therapeutics (a collaboration of Cambridge, UCL, Johnson and Johnson, Astra Zeneca, and GSK) looking for inhibitors of TLR4 as potential treatments for Alzheimer’s disease and asthma. Dr. Bryant is the founder of two biotech companies, serves on the scientific advisory boards of biotech and big pharma companies in the UK and USA, and has collaborative grants with different pharmaceutical companies.

Dr. Bryant has extensive experience in working with the media, particularly working with the BBC, regularly appearing on local and national radio and television shows. She was elected as a fellow of the British Pharmacology Society in 2020 for her research into inflammation. She became Director of the NIH Oxford-Cambridge Program at the University of Cambridge in 2022.