A huge thank you to my PhD supervisors @douglaspdyer.bsky.social and Amy for their support in this work, as well as our collaborators, including Olga Zubkova and Max Nobis, who made this possible! 💪

Putting all of this together, we propose that immune cells have a heparan sulfate glycocaylx which must be shed to enable migration into tissues. A whole new mechanism regulating immune cell migration!

To confirm that HS on the immune cell surface was regulating migration, we enzymatically cleaved HS from the immune cell surface, which resulted in a greater ability to adhere to endothelial cells and migrate towards the chemokine CCL7

Despite seeing reduced shed and migration in response to the mimetic, in another twist, this actually resulted in greater inflammation due to lower numbers of Tregs 🫣

It turned out that lots of immune cells have HS on their surfaces and they seemed to get rid of it in response to inflammation. We think this process helps them more easily enter the tissues during inflammation

In a major twist, we found that it was actually HS on the immune cells themselves which was reduced following inflammation.

🕵️ What we actually found: We were surprised when we looked directly at the HS on the surface of endothelial cells, and saw no evidence of the presumed shedding of HS from the blood vessel wall

🤔 What we thought: We wanted to see whether this would happen in a model of an inflammatory skin disease called psoriasis, where we had observed that there were elevated levels of a glycan known as heparan sulfate (HS) circulating in the blood

Others have observed that in different inflammatory conditions, the glycocalyx lining our blood vessels is broken down or shed, and this allows more immune cells to enter the tissues and cause inflammation

🦠 What we knew before: Sugars, or glycans, coat the surface of nearly every cell, in a layer called the ‘glycocalyx’. In blood vessels, this layer is especially thick and forms a barrier which can control whether immune cells leave the blood and enter tissues

My PhD work is (finally) published in Science Signaling! And it made the cover!

Here’s what we found 🧵⬇️

www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

REGISTRATION FOR THE 2026 PROTEOGLYCANS GRS + GRC IS NOW OPEN! 🦠 (….and there’s a discount 😍)

Join us next summer for the GRS on Proteoglycans! We’re so excited to welcome our early career researchers that we’re giving the first 20 sign-ups a bursary towards their travel 🧵⬇️

My first presentation as a postdoc! 🎙️

Yesterday I attended the KendallSqBio postdoc symposium where it was a pleasure to discover the cool work going on in our area as well as share what I’ve been up to with my lab’s new story on glycans in cancer! 🦠

After a great few weeks settling into my new lab with @jcstark.bsky.social at the @mitkochinstitute.bsky.social , I’m thrilled to share I have been awarded a TBBCF postdoc fellowship! This award will fund the next 2 years of my research targeting glycans for the treatment of breast cancer 🦠