Centre for Innate Immunity & Infectious Disease

Dr Ashley Mansell

Dr Ashley Mansell is a senior scientist and head of the Toll-Like Receptor (TLR) Signaling Laboratory in the Centre for Innate Immunity and Infectious Diseases.  Dr Mansell is also an NHMRC RD Wright Postdoctoral Research Fellow.

After working as a research assistant for several years in Melbourne, Dr Mansell completed his PhD in 2002 with Prof Luke O’Neill at Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland. Returning to Australia in 2002, he was recruited by Professor Paul Hertzog to form a TLR research laboratory at MIMR where he has continued in the relatively new research field of TLR signal transduction and its role in inflammatory diseases.

As TLRs, and other pattern recognition receptors, form the basis by which our innate immune system recognize and respond to infections, this field of research has expanded rapidly since its discovery in 1998.  This has led to TLR research being one of fastest and highly published areas in immunology.  Dr Mansell’s research group is primarily interested in understanding TLR signal transduction to initiate the pro-inflammatory response following pathogen recognition.  His group has also made critical discoveries on how this pathway is turned off after activation. This is a crucial process, as a failure to correctly regulate the inflammatory response can lead to chronic inflammation; the clinical outcomes of which can lead to severe sepsis, septic shock, atherosclerosis, arthritis, asthma, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) and chronic inflammatory diseases.  Recent discoveries have also highlighted that viruses target these TLR response mechanisms as a way of avoiding the body’s ability to eradicate infections such as hepatitis B.  Dr Mansell has long-standing collaborations with leading researchers in the field both within Australia and overseas.

Dr Mansell has published his research in the highest ranking journals including Nature, Nature Immunology, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA (PNAS) and the Journal of Biological Chemistry.  He has recently formed the Australian TLR research network, TLROZ , and heads an Infection and Immunity Special Interest Group within the Australasian Society for Immunology Inc. Dr Mansell has organized both national and international research conferences. His research has been acknowledged by invitations to present at numerous international and national conferences and is the holder of research funding within Australia (NHMRC, Cancer Council) and overseas (Association for International Cancer Research).