Murphy Wan

Murphy is a newly joined Lecturer in Biomedical Sciences of the School of Pharmacy and Biomedical Sciences at University of Portsmouth.

She graduated from the University of Hong Kong with a Bachelor’s degree in Food and Nutritional Science in 2009 and then completed her master’s and PhD degrees in Toxicology, Microbiology and Immunology in 2012 and 2015. In January 2015, she took up her postdoctoral position at the University of Hong Kong, where she co-established the gut health platform with Dr Hani El-Nezami to understand how the complex interplay between diet/pathogens, innate immune system as well as gut microbiome affects our health, which will lead to the development of innovative and cost-efficient preventative or therapeutic measures to cure complex diseases.

In July 2018, Murphy joined the group of Professor Catharina Svanborg in the Department of Laboratory Medicine at Lund University, Sweden. During this time, she worked on a discovery showing that “the quintessential oncogene” MYC regulated mucosal immune responses and introduced a new approach to c-Myc inhibition, involving molecules secreted by pathogenic bacteria. The therapeutic efficacy of this approach to c-MYC inhibition has also been successfully demonstrated in different mouse cancer models. In addition, she was working on how genetics controls the innate immune responses to urinary tract infection and examine the interplay between host genetics and gut microbiome in predicting urinary tract infection susceptibility using different knockout mouse models. Her goals are to discover new diagnostic biomarkers and immunotherapeutic approaches that can be translated in future clinical settings.

To support these financially demanding research work, she has been actively securing external funding. Furthermore, she has a long-established consortium in the fields of toxicology, infection biology/microbiology and immunology, both nationally and internationally.

For more information about her research, please visit my lab page.

Research Interests

• Discovery and development of novel therapies against infection, inflammatory diseases and cancer;
• Exploring how the microbiota affect host immunity to diseases;
• Emphasis on integration of different omics technologies for in-depth investigation of disease mechanisms and discoveries of novel biomarkers.