Speakers

Marton Olbei is a Teaching Fellow at Imperial College London, where he uses systems biology to study immune signalling. His work centres on cytokines: how they influence one another, and what that means for inflammation. The broader aim is to apply this understanding to Inflammatory Bowel Disease (IBD). 

Cytokines are the signalling proteins immune cells use to communicate and orchestrate immune responses. Current IBD drugs target individual cytokines such as TNF and IL-23A, but responses are often not durable, which makes the wider signalling network important to understand. In his recent work on ulcerative colitis (a subtype of IBD), published in Science Signaling in 2026, Marton and collaborators have built cytokine signalling networks from single-cell data taken from patient biopsies and validated them in patient-derived organoids. The networks showed how cytokine networks are rewired across different stages of disease and treatment, and they identified TL1A, a cytokine that sits upstream of both TNF and IL-23A, as a potential new therapeutic target. The same method can be applied to other immune-mediated inflammatory diseases. 

Inflammatory Bowel Disease is a complex disease that affects millions of people, and the chronic inflammation behind it is driven by immune signalling that has been hard to untangle. By studying how these key signalling molecules regulate one another, Marton's work aims to clarify how the disease takes hold and where treatments might intervene most effectively.