Professor John Todd
PhD, FRS, FMedSci
Jeffrey Cheah Fellow, Professorial Fellow
I grew up in Northern Ireland, leaving in 1976 to start my first degree in Biological Sciences at the University of Edinburgh. After graduating in 1980 I started my PhD at the University of Cambridge in the Biochemistry Department and Gonville and Caius College, graduated in 1983, and then undertook postdoctoral fellowships at Cambridge and at Stanford University. After three years at Stanford Medical School (1985-1988) I took my first Principal Investigator/Group Leader/Professor position in the Nuffield Department of Surgery, University of Oxford from 1988 to 1998, when I moved to Cambridge to continue my diabetes research in the Department of Medical Genetics. I returned to Oxford and the Centre for Human Genetics, Nuffield Department of Medicine in 2016 to further progress our research but also to run clinical trials based on research findings.
In summary, I am a medical geneticist researching the causes and prevention of autoimmune diseases, where the immune system attacks the body’s own tissues. I am best known for developing new theoretical and experimental approaches, and I was one of the first to detail the genetic basis of type 1 diabetes.
My research has shown that the presence of several genes can increase the risk of developing diabetes. These genes are linked to blood cells called regulatory T cells, which usually help to stop the destruction of insulin-producing cells in the pancreas. My work led to the suggestion that boosting the action of the T cells could help to prevent or treat diabetes, and this approach is currently the focus of clinical trials.
In the last three years I have helped establish and run a new major collaboration with GSK, the Institute for Molecular and Computational Medicine.
I have published over 400 scientific papers during my career and won several awards and prizes, including Fellowship of the Royal Society (2009) and the 2021 EASD-Novo Nordisk Foundation Diabetes Prize for Excellence.
Diabetes
http://www.ndm.ox.ac.uk/principal-investigators/researcher/john-todd
https://www.chg.ox.ac.uk/news/oxford-university-to-accelerate-t1d-research-and-care-with-ps10m-gift
7,506 The Wellcome Trust Case Control Consortium. (2007) Genome-wide association study of 14,000 cases of seven common diseases and 3,000 shared controls. Nature 447, 661-678. PMID: 17554300. PMCID: PMC2719288
1,942 Todd, J.A., Bell, J.I. & McDevitt, H.O. (1987) HLA-DQβ gene contributes to susceptibility and resistance to insulin-dependent diabetes mellitus. Nature 329, 599-604.
1,764 Ueda, H., Howson, J.M.M., Esposito, L., Heward, J., Snook, H., Chamberlain, G., Rainbow, D.B., Hunter, K.M.D., Smith, A.N., DiGenova, G., Herr, M.H., Dahlman, I., Payne, F., Smyth, D., Lowe, C., Twells, R.C.J., Howlett, S., Healy, B., Nutland, S., Rance, H.E., Everett, V., Smink, L.J., Lam, A.C., Cordell, H.J., Walker, N.M., Bordin, C., Hulme, J., Motzo, C., Cucca, F., Hess, J.F., Metzker, M.L., Rogers, J., Gregory, S., Allahabadia, A., Nithiyananthan, R., Tuomilehto-Wolf, E., Tuomilehto, J., Bingley, P., Gillespie, K.M., Undlien, D.E., Rønningen, K.S., Guja, C., Ionescu-Tîrgovişte, C., Savage, D.A., Carson, D.J., Maxwell, A.P., Patterson, C.C., Franklyn, J.A., Clayton, D.G., Peterson, L.B., Wicker, L.S., Todd, J.A. & Gough, S.C.L. (2003) Association of the T cell regulatory gene CTLA4 with susceptibility to autoimmune disease. Nature 423, 506-511. PMID: 12724789.
1,320 Barrett, J.C., Clayton, D., Concannon, P., Akolkar, B., Cooper, J.D., Erlich, H.A., Julier, C., Morahan, G., Nerup, J., Nierras, C., Plagnol, V., Pociot, F., Schuilenberg, H., Smyth, D.J., Stevens, H., Todd, J.A., Walker, N.M., Rich, S.S., & the Type 1 Diabetes Genetics Consortium. (2009) Genome-wide association study and meta-analysis indicates that over 40 loci affect risk of type 1 diabetes. Nature Genet. 41, 703-707. PMID: 19430480. PMCID: PMC2889014.
Sun, B. B., Maranville, J.C., Peters, J. E., Stacey, D., Staley, J.S., Blackshaw, J., Burgess, S., Jiang, T., Paige, E., Surendran, P., Oliver-Williams, C., Kamat, M. A., Prins, B.P., Wilcox, S.K., Zimmerman, E.S., Chi, A., Bansal, N., Spain, S.L., Wood, A.M., Morrell, N.W., Bradley, J.R., Janjic, N., Roberts, D.J., Ouwehand, W.H., Todd, J.A., Soranzo, N., Suhre, K., Paul, D.S., Fox, C.S., Plenge, R.M., Danesh, J., Runz, H., Butterworth, A.S. (2018) Genomic atlas of the human plasma proteome. Nature 558, 73-79. PMID: 29875488.
1,276 Wang, W.Y.S., Barratt, B.J., Clayton, D.G. & Todd, J.A. (2005) Genome-wide association studies: theoretical and practical concerns. Nature Rev. Genet. 6, 109-118.
1,225 Davies, J.L., Kawaguchi, Y., Bennett, S.T., Copeman, J.B., Cordell, H.J., Pritchard, L.E., Reed, P.W., Gough, S.C.L., Jenkins, S.C., Palmer, S.M., Balfour, K.M., Rowe, B.R., Farrall, M., Barnett, A.H., Bain, S.C., & Todd, J.A. (1994) A genome-wide search for human type 1 diabetes susceptibility genes. Nature 371, 130-136. PMID: 8072542.
1,181 Todd, J.A., Walker, N.M., Cooper, J.D., Smyth, D.J., Downes, K., Plagnol, V., Bailey, R., Nejentsev, S., Field, S.F., Payne, F., Lowe, C.E., Szeszko, J.S., Hafler, J.P., Zeitels, L., Yang, J.H.M., Vella, A., Nutland, S., Stevens, H.E., Schuilenburg, H., Coleman, G., Maisuria, M., Meadows, W., Smink, L.J., Healy, B., Burren, O.S., Lam, A.H., Ovington, N.R., Allen, J., Adlem, E., Leung, H.-T., Wallace, C., Howson, J.M.M., Guja, C., Ionescu-Tirgoviste, C., Genetics of Type 1 Diabetes in Finland, Simmonds, M.J., Heward, J.M., Gough, S.C.G., The Wellcome Trust Case Control Consortium, Dunger, D.B., Wicker, L.S. & Clayton, D.G. (2007) Robust associations of four new chromosome regions from genome-wide analyses of type 1 diabetes. Nature Genet. 39, 857-864. PMID: 17554260.
1,144 The Wellcome Trust Case Control Consortium (2007) Association scan of 14,500 nonsynonymous SNPs in four diseases identifies autoimmunity variants. Nature Genet. 39, 1329-1337.