Fellow and Tutor in Medicine

Paul Fairchild

  • I am Associate Professor in Medicine at the Sir William Dunn School of Pathology.

  • I am Founding Director of the Oxford Stem Cell Institute.

  • I am a member of the Scientific Advisory Board of the government’s Cell and Gene Therapy Catapult.

  • I serve as Deputy Editor of the Journal of Immunology and Regenerative Medicine.

  • I am also a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy.

  • I am an Associate of the Faraday Institute, University of Cambridge.

Paul Fairchild

Teaching

At Trinity, I tutor second-year medical students in Principles of Pathology and Psychology for Medicine and second-year Biomedical Sciences students in Immunology and Microbiology. For the third-year courses in Medicine and Biomedical Sciences, I tutor the Infection and Immunity options. I also teach immunology to second and third year Biochemistry students. At the faculty level, I lecture on the Principles of Pathology course for second-year Medicine and the FHS (Final Honour School) course in Immunity. I also give lectures for a course in Immunology in the Department of Biochemistry.

For my undergraduate teaching, I received Teaching Excellence Awards from the Medical Sciences Division in 2008, 2013 and 2019 and was shortlisted by the Oxford University Students Union in 2016 for the award of ‘Outstanding Tutor in the Medical Sciences Division’.

My teaching for graduate students includes MSc courses in Integrated Immunology and Experimental and Translational Therapeutics. I have also supervised eight research students to the successful completion of their DPhil projects.

Retinal Pigmented Epithelium
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Retinal Pigmented Epithelium

Research

I began my research career in Oxford, where I studied for a doctorate in the Nuffield Department of Surgical Sciences, focussing on the dual role of dendritic cells in allograft rejection and immunological self-tolerance. I subsequently spent five years as a Post-doctoral Fellow in the Department of Pathology, University of Cambridge, investigating the aetiology of autoimmune disease, but returned to Oxford in 1995 to take up a post at the Sir William Dunn School of Pathology.

My current research continues to draw on my background in transplantation immunology, in order to investigate the nature of the immune response to tissues differentiated from pluripotent stem cells and to develop approaches to the induction and maintenance of immunological tolerance to prevent their rejection. Furthermore, I have developed a programme of research aimed at exploiting the properties of pluripotent stem cells to address unmet medical needs with an immunological basis. Protocols developed in my laboratory for the directed differentiation of dendritic cell subsets from human induced pluripotent stem cells offer an opportunity for their use in immunotherapy for the treatment of a spectrum of disease states from cancer to the lysosomal storage diseases. This intellectual property will form the basis of a biotech spin out company from my laboratory focussing initially on the treatment of colorectal cancer.

You can find out more about my work at:

https://www.path.ox.ac.uk/content/paul-fairchild

https://ct.catapult.org.uk/about-us/our-team/our-advisory-panel

GFP-labelled Dendritic Cell
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GFP-labelled Dendritic Cell

Selected Publications

Primary Research Papers

Horton C., Davies T.J., Lahiri P., Sachamitr P., Fairchild P.J., ‘iPS cells reprogrammed from primary dendritic cells provide an abundant source of immunostimulatory dendritic cells for use in immunotherapy’, Stem Cells 38(1) (2019), 67-79 [doi: 10.1002/stem.3095]

Fairchild P.J., Davies T.J., Horton C., Shanmugarajah K., Bravo M., ‘Immunotherapy with iPSC-derived dendritic cells brings a new perspective to an old debate: Autologous versus allogeneic?’, Cell & Gene Therapy Insights 5(5) (2019), 565-577 [doi:10.18609/cgti.2019.062]

Sachamitr P., Leishman A., Davies T. and Fairchild P.J., ‘Directed differentiation of human induced pluripotent stem cells into dendritic cells displaying tolerogenic properties and resembling the CD141+ subset’, Frontiers in Immunology 8 (2018), 1935 [doi: 10.3389/fimmu.2017.01935]

Zhao H., Davies T.J., Ning J., Chang Y., Sachamitr P., Sattler S., Fairchild P.J., Huang F-P., ‘A highly optimized protocol for reprogramming cancer cells to pluripotency using non-viral plasmid vectors’, Cell Reprogam. 17(1) (2015), 1-12

Silk K.M., Silk J.D., Ichiryu N., Davies T.J., Carpenter L., Watt S.M., Cerundolo V., Fairchild P.J., ‘Cross-presentation of tumor antigens by induced pluripotent stem cell-derived CD141+ XCR1+ dendritic cells’, Gene Therapy 19(10) (2012), 1035-1040

Books and Edited Volumes

(Ed.) The Immunological Barriers to Regenerative Medicine (Springer-Verlag: New York, 2012)

(Ed.), Regenerative Medicine Vol 10(3) (May 2015) (guest editor for Special Focus Issue devoted to the immunology of regenerative medicine)

(Ed.), Current Opinion in Organ Transplantation. Vol 14(4) (August 2009) (editor of section devoted to transplantation tolerance)

(Ed.), Immunological Tolerance: Methods and Protocols (June 2007) (Humana Press: Totowa, New Jersey, June 2007)

Dalian 2009 IdeasLab - Paul Fairchild
Professor Fairchild
paul.fairchild@trinity.ox.ac.uk

The immune system is a double-edged sword: while we cannot live without it, it can prove extremely difficult to tame.