Submitted by Yan Pan on Fri, 11/07/2025 - 10:16
Professor Bryant receives European Research Council funding alongside Wellcome Trust Discovery Award and BSI Outstanding Leadership Award for her pioneering work on innate immunity and host inflammatory responses.
Professor Clare Bryant, Professor of Innate Immunity at the University of Cambridge Departments of Medicine and Veterinary Medicine, has been awarded a 2025 Advanced Grant from the European Research Council (ERC) to investigate how the body’s early immune defences respond to infections transmitted between animals and humans.
The grant will support Professor Bryant’s ground-breaking research into how pattern recognition receptors in both human and avian immune systems activate cell death pathways and drive the host inflammatory response to zoonotic infections.
Professor Bryant is one of the 11 senior researchers at the University of Cambridge who have received the ERC Advanced Grant in this latest funding round. This funding, worth €721 million in total, is one of the most competitive and prestigious funding schemes in Europe. The funding allows Professor Bryant, and other successful ERC advanced grant holders, to pursue ambitious, curiosity-driven projects that could lead to major scientific breakthroughs.
The award comes in a bumper year of honours for Professor Bryant. She has also received a Wellcome Trust Discovery Award, designed to fund visionary researchers tackling the biggest questions in science, for her fundamental mechanistic research into how Pattern Recognition Receptors signal and she has been named the recipient of the 2025 British Society for Immunology Outstanding Leadership Award. Earlier this year, she was elected a Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences, recognising her exceptional contributions to improving health for everyone.
None of this has sunk in to be honest and I am very grateful to my colleagues who nominated me for the AMS and the BSI Leadership award! I am also so excited to have long term funding for my research which is made possible by my fantastic collaborators David Klenerman (Chemistry) and Yorgo Modis (Medicine). This success is due to the incredible hard work of the amazing scientists in my research group who I am lucky enough to work with.
Professor Clare Bryant
Professor Bryant is a valued member of the Department of Medicine that is dedicated to translating world-class fundamental research into real-world interventions that improve health and wellbeing for the public. We are proud to have her as part of our community, advancing understanding of immune responses and helping to shape global approaches to infectious and inflammatory disease.
We also congratulate all recipients of the 2025 ERC Advanced Grants. Meet all this year’s Cambridge grantees here.
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