The Kennedy Trust launched its Research Ignition Awards in 2023, with the aim of pump-priming innovative and ambitious avenues of research into rheumatic and related musculoskeletal, immunological and inflammatory diseases. Following peer-review by an independent panel of experts, ten awards of up to £100k over 1-2 years were funded.
We congratulate the successful award recipients and share a short summary of their exciting projects here.
| Dr Ghada Alsaleh, University of Oxford – Targeting TFEB to develop pharmaceutical interventions for osteoarthritis | |
| Dr Kim Chisholm, University of Nottingham – The Gatekeepers of Pain: Shedding light on the role of projection neurons in osteoarthritic pain | |
| Prof Ian Clark, Dr Rose Davidson and Prof Alex MacGregor, University of East Anglia – Dietary Screening Bioactives in Arthritis (DISCOVER) Platform | |
| Prof Marco Fritzsche, University of Oxford – Establishing next-generation SPI-LLSM drug profiling technology for rheumatological, musculoskeletal, and related inflammatory disorders | |
| Prof Paul J. Lehner & Dr Christian Gawden-Bone, University of Cambridge – Identifying drug targets in VEXAS syndrome – a novel auto-inflammatory disease | |
| Dr Pierre V. Maillard, Queen Mary University of London, and Dr Annemarthe G. van der Veen, Leiden University – Peptide mimicry of a viral protein to halt interferon-driven autoinflammation | |
| Dr Rushad Pavri, King’s College London – Investigating the importance of somatic hypermutation in autoimmune arthritis in mice | |
| Dr Rebecca L. Ross, University of Leeds – Exploring the relation between circulating epithelial cells (CECs) and autoimmunity in the pathogenesis of systemic fibrosis | |
| Dr Srilakshmi M. Sharma, University of Oxford – Characterisation of cells in aqueous humour as a target tissue in uveitis; a spondyloarthropathy-associated disease using parallel proteomics and single cell RNA sequencing | |
| Dr Akira Wiberg, University of Oxford – Towards novel non-surgical therapies for carpal tunnel syndrome: A detailed characterisation of the sub-synovial connective tissues |
