Eoin McKinney

Eoin McKinney is a nephrologist with an interest in the pathways driving and marking severe, relapsing autoimmune disease. He holds a Wellcome Trust Fellowship, and his work explores parallel ways in which the immune response deals with persistent infection and persistent self-antigen during a number of relapsing autoimmune and inflammatory diseases.

The immune response is a powerful and complex system that has evolved to protect us from pathogens and from tumours. Losing control of that system results in immunopathology, manifest in a broad range of diseases including autoimmunity (such as T1D, lupus, multiple sclerosis), autoinflammatory disease (such as Crohn’s disease, Ulcerative colitis), infection and malignancy.

The McKinney Group use a systems immunology approach – modelling a broad range of quantitative traits as a means of discovering previously unsuspected relationships between them – to better understand the dysfunctional immune response in human disease. Our goal is to better understand what shapes that aberrant response and to use that information to indicate novel tests and/or interventions that can help clinicians treating immune pathology.