Jonathan Worboys

Jonathan is a Wellcome Trust Research Fellow based in the Lydia Becker Institute of Immunology and Inflammation and the Division of Immunology, Immunity to Infection & Respiratory Medicine.

Jonathan is originally from South Wales and moved to London in 2006 for his undergraduate studies at Imperial College London, where he read Biology with a year in Europe and spent a year at the Université Paul Sabatier in Toulouse. In 2010 he then moved to the Institute of Cancer Research in London to complete a PhD with Dr. Claus Jørgensen working on oncogenic kinase signalling using mass spectrometry. For his postdoctoral studies he switched fields to work in immunology firstly with Dr. Gloria Lopez-Castejon in 2015 working on the ubiquitination of the innate immune receptor NLRP3 and with Prof. Dan Davis in 2018 where he used super-resolution microscopy to study the organisation of immunoreceptors. In 2024 he received a prestigious 8-year Wellcome Trust Career Development Award to establish his own research group at the University.

Jonathan is interested in how the spatial organisation of immune receptors controls their function. Immune cells communicate with other cells in the body through proteins on their surface called receptors. When immune cells interact these molecules arrange into intricate patterns at the interaction sites, and evidence suggests this organisation is vital for their function. Thus cellular communication relies on protein organisation and understanding this process could lead to a new understanding of what happens when cells fail to communicate properly as well as the development of therapies that manipulate protein organisation.

Jonathan's research is primarily focused on a group of receptors called immune checkpoints. These are regulatory proteins that normally function to prevent a catastrophic overactivation of immune responses. In cancer, preventing these molecules from working has led to a revolutionary new form of treatment, with massive promise. Currently these therapies aren't refined and only work in a fraction of patients. Jonathan's research aims to better understand immune checkpoints and how the therapies towards these molecules work in order to drive their development.