Dr Tim Raine

Clinician and Honorary Faculty at the Wellcome Sanger Institute

Dr Tim Raine is a practising clinician with an interest in inflammatory bowel diseases (IBD) and mucosal immunology. His research is focused on understanding the regulation of the gastrointestinal immune system.

In his PhD thesis with Prof Anne Cooke (University of Cambridge), Tim explored the effects of Salmonella infection and gastrointestinal helminth infection on the function of tissue resident innate immune cells. For his postdoctoral research, Tim has worked with Prof. Adrian Hayday (King’s College, London), Prof Chris Rudd (Cambridge Institute for Medical Research) and Prof Arthur Kaser and Dr Miles Parkes (University of Cambridge). Tim has developed new techniques for the extraction and characterisation of immunocytes from human gut endoscopic biopsies. Using these techniques, together with ex vivo analysis methods including polychromatic flow cytometry, live cell confocal microscopy and microfluidic culture systems, Tim has been able to study human gastrointestinal lymphocytes using material from a range of patient groups including healthy control volunteers (a group not amenable to study using traditional large scale methods with surgical resection material). In particular, together with Dr Carl Anderson (Sanger Institute), Tim has developed novel laboratory and computational approaches for understanding the transcriptomic and chromatin state landscape of individual immune cell populations. By setting these data within the context of genetic polymorphisms and microbial signatures associated with IBD, he aims to understand the immunological basis for genetic risk in IBD.

In addition, Tim has an interest in human clinical trials in IBD, and serves on the British Society of Gastroenterology IBD Clinical Research Group. He is a named investigator/sub-investigator on several ongoing phase II/III clinical trials, and well as working in first-in-man/early phase clinical trials.