Scientists awarded £5.7m to harness epigenetics in next-generation anti-viral therapies

Researchers at Barts Cancer Institute, Queen Mary University of London, have been awarded funding as part of a £5.7m national collaborative initiative exploring how epigenetics – the processes that control how genes are switched on and off – can be harnessed to strengthen our immune system’s ability to fight viruses.

Dr Gabriella Ficz, Group Leader at Barts Cancer Institute, will receive £880,000 to support her team’s contribution to the epiPRIME project (Epigenetically Programmed Resilience through Innate Memory Engineering). The collaboration is led by Dr Chiara Herzog at the University of Cambridge and includes teams at University College London, King’s College London, University of Birmingham and the University of York.

The funding is awarded by the Advanced Research and Invention Agency (ARIA), an R&D funding agency created to unlock technological breakthroughs that benefit everyone. Created by an Act of Parliament and sponsored by the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology, ARIA funds teams of scientists and engineers to pursue research at the edge of what is scientifically and technologically possible.

The grant forms part of a wider £57 million programme announced by ARIA today (25^th June), supporting 11 research teams to develop a new class of medicines designed to provide broad and long-lasting protection against respiratory viruses. The programme focuses on engineering the innate immune system – the body’s fast-acting first line of defence – to transform how we protect against rapidly evolving and emerging viral threats.

Understanding epigenetics in health and disease

Epigenetics plays a crucial role in determining how cells behave by controlling which genes are active or inactive without altering the DNA sequence itself. Researchers increasingly recognise that diseases such as cancer are driven not only by genetic mutations, but also by changes in these gene-switching mechanisms.

Dr Ficz and her team specialise in understanding how epigenetic processes become disrupted in ageing and cancer, and how these changes contribute to disease development. Their ultimate goal is to identify new ways to prevent cancer before it begins.

The team has previously shown that certain epigenetic changes can prevent cells from entering senescence – a natural state in which cells stop dividing – enabling them to multiply and acquire hallmarks of cancer.

This research has been enabled by advances in CRISPR technology – a gene-targeting tool often described as “molecular scissors” – which the team has adapted to precisely target specific regions of the genome. Rather than altering the DNA sequence itself, these tools allow researchers to add or remove epigenetic signals, helping them to study how these changes influence a cell’s potential to become cancerous.

Importantly, the team showed that this epigenetic editing can create durable molecular ‘memories’ in human cells and reshape immune cell function. This crucial proof of principle helped lay the foundation for epiPRIME.

Reprogramming the immune system to fight viruses

The epiPRIME project will bring together an interdisciplinary team from across the UK to investigate how the innate immune system can be reprogrammed to improve resilience to respiratory viruses such as colds, influenza and coronaviruses.

While vaccines have been a major success story of medicine of the 20^th century, they fail to keep pace with challenges today’s viruses. This is because vaccines are developed to target the ‘adaptive’ part of the immune system, which aims to prevent specific pathogens.

epiPRIME will instead study the ‘innate’ part of the immune system, which rapidly clears viruses and can prevent or curb infections. The team hopes to achieve this by building on Dr Ficz’s team’s previous work to create epigenetic ‘memories’. They aim to precisely install new memories, in the form of DNA methylation, upgrading the software of our immune cells so they can recognise and respond to threats they’ve never encountered before.

The epiPRIME team will study how epigenetic patterns differ between people who have good resilience or poor resilience against viral infections. Dr Ficz’s group will use their expertise to explore whether epigenetic editing in specific locations in immune cells’ genomes can create long-lasting changes that improve antiviral defence while minimising off-target effects and excessive inflammation. Collaborators will then develop and test methods to safely deliver these changes within living systems.

Unlocking new approaches for cancer

Although this project focuses on respiratory viruses, Dr Ficz believes that advances in epigenetic editing technologies could have significant implications for cancer research and patient care in the future.

By improving our ability to manipulate epigenetic processes and enhance immune function, scientists could create new strategies to prevent cancer from developing, as well as to strengthen the effectiveness of existing treatments such as immunotherapy.

This work is supported by a strong collaborative environment at Queen Mary. Dr Ficz co-leads the Queen Mary Centre for Epigenetics, an interdisciplinary community bringing together researchers working across areas including cancer, cardiovascular disease and early human development.

“We’re fortunate to have one of the largest groups of labs working on epigenetics in the UK at Queen Mary,” Dr Ficz says. “This collaborative environment provides a unique forum for feedback and idea sharing among experts from across disciplines. It was instrumental to our success in this grant and will continue to be important in supporting us to build on this work and translate advances into patient benefit.”

Read more about the funded projects