Kiki Cano-Gamez

Current research

I am a postdoctoral researcher studying the host immune response during sepsis. Sepsis is a life-threatening condition caused by an uncontrolled response to infection, and it contributes significantly to the worldwide burden of infectious diseases. While advances in life support have reduced the mortality of this condition, our understanding of sepsis is incomplete and there is an urgent need for new treatment alternatives. In particular, sepsis is a heterogeneous condition, and patients could benefit from stratification into risk groups and personalised treatments. My research focuses on using high-throughout data to build reliable methods for precision medicine in sepsis. I am particularly interested in understanding which cellular alterations put patients at high risk and how these change over time.

Background

I have a background in imunogenomics, with a particular emphasis on the use of single-cell technologies to study cellular functions. I completed a BSc in Biotechnology at Tecnologico de Monterrey, Mexico (2015), after which I moved to the UK to pursue an MPhil in Biological Science at the University of Cambridge (2017). I then completed my PhD in Cambridge (2020), where I was funded by a Gates Cambridge Scholarship and trained under the supervision of Dr Gosia Trynka at the Wellcome Sanger Institute. My PhD research focused on understanding the role of CD4+ T cells in common immune diseases such as autoimmunities. In particular, I studied the response of T cells to activation under different settings and assessed how common genetic variants modify this process. Since 2021, I joined professor Julian Knight's group as a postdoctoral researcher.