Research profile: Dr Allison-Lynn Andrews

Dr Allison-Lynn AndrewsDr Allison-Lynn Andrews is an Asthma UK Research Fellow based at the Inflammation, Infection and Repair Division of the School of Medicine at the University of Southampton.

Asthma UK is supporting her current research into understanding how the immune system prevents inflammation in the lung and the development of potential treatments for asthma.

Why is asthma so interesting as a research issue?

Asthma is a complex condition involving both environmental and genetic influences. The more we investigate, the more complexities it reveals. This represents a major academic challenge, to unravel the exact mechanisms that lead to someone having asthma.

Technological advances have enabled us to examine the underlying cellular and molecular processes that lead to the symptoms experienced by many people with asthma. We need to understand more clearly what occurs within the airways and translate this into the development of new treatments to improve the quality of life of people with asthma.

What do you most enjoy about your work?

I have always been interested in biochemistry and cell biology. I greatly enjoy the research process whereby you have an idea, you ask questions and try to design experiments to test your theory. This may take considerable time and effort and progress can be excruciatingly slow. However, sometimes it can just be one experimental result or a chance comment by a colleague that makes everything fall into place – that’s the most exciting part.

How does Asthma UK help your research?

Despite the fact that the incidence of asthma has increased significantly over the last ten years, it has received little government funding. Therefore, the support of Asthma UK has been vitally important to us at Southampton.

Asthma UK has funded several project grants that have supported many aspects of asthma research. These include the effect of virus infection on the airways of people with asthma and the role of key chemical messengers that maintain inflammation in their airways.

One of my earlier projects funded by Asthma UK looked at a type of chemical messenger called the interleukins. Interleukin-4 (IL-4) and Interleukin-13 (IL-13), play an important role in the development of inflammation in the airways. During this project I was able to make crucial observations about how IL-13 and IL-4 control the activation of cells in the airways. The results of this work form the basis of Asthma UK's Research Fellowship programme.

With the support of Asthma UK I will be able to continue this research to better understand the processes that drive inflammation, with a view to developing new treatments to help people gain better control of their asthma.

What do you hope to achieve as a result of your research?

I hope to understand more about how inflammation occurs and persists within the airways of people with asthma and how this is controlled. Asthma is a complex condition, where there is often an inherited tendency to develop asthma within families. I plan to use cells donated by volunteers who have also given us a full medical history of their asthma. A clear understanding of the volunteers’ background will give us a much better awareness of what is actually happening in their lungs, particularly at the molecular level.

This research may help us understand how to control inflammation, by dampening down the effects of key chemical messengers such as IL-13 and IL-4. It is vital that we translate these research findings into new treatments to improve the care available to people with asthma.


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