'Best PhD Talk' awarded to Tissue Repair student Pieter Louwe

Third-year Tissue Repair student Pieter Louwe awarded ‘Best PhD talk’ at BSI Conference on Inflammation.

Many congratulations to Pieter Louwe on being awarded ‘Best PhD talk’ at the conference ‘Inflammation: from initiation to restoration’ in Edinburgh, organised by the British Society for Immunology and the MRC Centre for Inflammation Research (24-26 April 2019).

Pieter presented his talk on ‘The fate and plasticity of inflammatory macrophages during peritonitis’ during the first conference day, reserved for Early Career speakers. As part of the award, Pieter was then invited to present his work during the main conference the following day.

Pieter is a PhD student in the lab of Dr Steve Jenkins at the MRC Centre for Inflammation Research. For his PhD research Pieter uses a novel adoptive transfer system to investigate the capacity of inflammatory macrophages recruited during the early stages of peritonitis to contribute to the macrophage compartment post inflammation. His findings indicate that inflammatory macrophages persist long-term after the initiation of inflammation, but despite adapting a resident macrophage phenotype, they remain transcriptionally distinct. 

Pieter has established markers to identify inflammatory macrophages and using these markers was able to purify resident and inflammatory macrophages 8 weeks after inflammation. His preliminary data indicate that in vitro these inflammatory macrophages produce less cytokines in response to LPS stimulation.