The Towers Group
Our Research
In our lab in the Blizard Institute at QMUL we aim to understand how viruses work: how they infect us and cause disease and how they evade our millions of years worth of antiviral innate immunity. We take a multidisciplinary approach, combining molecular genetics, imaging, computation, phylogenetics and structural biology to understand in detail how viruses interact with their hosts. We explore novel therapeutic approaches for combating viral infection and inflammation using viruses as tools to guide us. We’d really like to better understand what is special about pandemic viruses HIV-1(M) and SARS-CoV-2 and how they have adapted to replicate in humans and cause disease. Of course, we also learn about host biology when we study viruses. We like to think that virologists are cell biologists with extra assays.
We are funded by:
Wellcome Investigator Award (‘Studying lentiviruses to understand mechanisms, regulation and consequences of nucleic acid sensing’ 220863/Z/20/Z),
Welcome Discovery Award (‘Innate Immune Regulation in Viral Infection and Cancer Chemotherapy’ 325794/Z/25/Z)
Wellcome Discovery award to Peijun Zhang in Oxford with Greg as co-applicant ('Resolving HIV-1 transport and host cofactor regulation in the cellular context' 311427/Z/24/Z)
We are part of the UKRI funded Genotype to Phenotype SARS-CoV-2 COVID19 consortium (MR/Y004205/1)
Evolution Education trust (EET) (The Evolution Education Trust PhD Studentship at UCL)
Rosetrees Trust and Stoneygate trust ('Development of Improved Transduction Enhancers for ex vivo and in vivo Gene Therapy Protocols through Discovery of Underlying Mechanisms and Advancing Structure Activity Relationship Chemistry').
