Contact information
+44 (0)1865 222049
Research groups
Colleges
Collaborators
-
Paul Holloway
Principal Investigator
Yvonne Couch
BSc (Hons), MSc, DPhil
Associate Professor of Neuroimmunology
- Alzheimer's Research UK Fellow
- Stipendiary Lecturer - Somerville College
- Associate Research Fellow - St Hilda's College
My primary research field is neuroimmunology, specifically how the brain communicates injury or illness to the systemic immune system, and vice-versa. I undertook a PhD in Pharmacology at the University of Oxford studying the role of the serotonergic system in mediating sickness behaviours. During this time I developed a keen interest in the elusive mechanisms of brain-immune communication and chose to pursue this in the field of stroke research. I obtained a prestigious Carlsberg Research Fellowship at the University of Southern Denmark to work with Prof. Kate Lambertsen on post-stroke depression. As a side project during my time in Odense I worked on the potential for extracellular vesicles (EVs) to play a role in distant organ communication.
I moved back to Oxford to work in the group of Prof. Alastair Buchan, obtaining a number of small independent grants which allowed me to explore the role of EVs in stroke. I am currently studying how EVs might act as injury signals to escape the brain after a stroke. EVs are lipid vesicles of varying sizes, shed from cells all the time, and thought to be a novel mechanism of cell to cell communication. My aim is to study whether these EVs contribute to inflammation within the central nervous system (CNS) after a stroke, but also whether they contribute to the injury signal that activates the systemic immune system.
In 2020 I was awarded an Alzheimer's Research UK Fellowship to study the effect of EVs on endothelial cells in the context of stroke and vascular dementia.
Recent publications
-
The effects of fasting on ischemic infarcts in the rat
Preprint
Schneider AM. et al, (2022)
-
In sickness and in health: The functional role of extracellular vesicles in physiology and pathology in vivo
Journal article
Yates AG. et al, (2022), Journal of Extracellular Vesicles, 11
-
In sickness and in health: The functional role of extracellular vesicles in physiology and pathology in vivo: Part I: Health and Normal Physiology: Part I: Health and Normal Physiology.
Journal article
Yates AG. et al, (2022), J Extracell Vesicles, 11
-
In sickness and in health: The functional role of extracellular vesicles in physiology and pathology in vivo: Part II: Pathology: Part II: Pathology.
Journal article
Yates AG. et al, (2022), J Extracell Vesicles, 11
-
A brief history of nearly EV-erything - The rise and rise of extracellular vesicles.
Journal article
Couch Y. et al, (2021), J Extracell Vesicles, 10
-
Acute IL-1RA treatment suppresses the peripheral and central inflammatory response to spinal cord injury.
Journal article
Yates AG. et al, (2021), J Neuroinflammation, 18
-
Rapamycin Induces an eNOS (Endothelial Nitric Oxide Synthase) Dependent Increase in Brain Collateral Perfusion in Wistar and Spontaneously Hypertensive Rats.
Journal article
Beard DJ. et al, (2020), Stroke