Emanuele Marchi

My background is in molecular biology, and I began my career studying the effect of BRCA1/2 polymorphisms in breast cancer before moving into bioinformatics during my PhD at the University of Surrey.

At the Weatherall Institute of Molecular Medicine in Oxford, I developed a clinical and molecular database for leukaemia patients and used machine learning to show that cancer cells in myeloid leukaemia originate from progenitors rather than stem cells. Later, at the Department of Zoology, I built tools to detect novel endogenous retrovirus integrations in the human genome, with implications for both cancer and viral infections such as HIV.

In immunology, I’ve applied multi-omics approaches to study T cell biology, uncovering mechanisms of exhaustion and the contrasting phenomenon of T cell inflation, and I also worked on hepatitis C infection, identifying transcriptomic signatures of disease progression and highlighting sex-specific molecular differences relevant to conditions like asthma and COVID-19.

More recently, my work has focused on respiratory and cancer immunology. In asthma, I integrated metagenomic and proteomic data to identify microbe-specific immune responses, and in nasopharyngeal carcinoma, I’m using single-cell and spatial transcriptomics to identify biomarkers and therapeutic targets. I recently joined Cancer Immunology in Oxford, where I focus on finding both classical and non-classical antigens for cancer vaccine development.

Broadly, my research aims to understand the mechanisms of sex-biased conditions in infectious and immune-related diseases, including asthma and EBV-driven cancers. I was awarded an NIHR Oxford BRC grant on sex differences in asthma and a John Fell Fund Award on nasopharyngeal carcinoma in Southeast Asia.