Toby Look

Toby works on Marek’s disease virus, one of the most highly oncogenic viruses currently known. Marek’s disease virus carries large financial burdens globally and is considered an excellent model for virus induced lymphomas. Toby is involved in identifying host genes which influence virus pathogenicity. His research has a primary focus on systematic CRISPR-Cas9 genome wide drop-out screens to identify host genes within Marek’s Disease transformed cell lines which influence proliferation and the reactivation of the virus from the latent state. He hopes to discover a new repertoire of genes involved in these processes to aid future work on the causation of lymphatic cancer; additionally, possible genetic vulnerabilities of these cells may be revealed, which could have implications in treatments for virally induced tumours.