Dr Cecilia Ansalone Secures Five-Year Arthritis UK Fellowship
Published: 7 September 2026
School of Infection & Immunity Research Fellow Dr Cecilia Ansalone has been awarded a prestigious five-year Arthritis UK Career Development Fellowship to establish her independent research programme in giant cell arteritis (GCA).
School of Infection & Immunity Research Fellow Dr Cecilia Ansalone has been awarded a prestigious five-year Arthritis UK Career Development Fellowship to establish her independent research programme in giant cell arteritis (GCA).
GCA causes inflammation in blood vessels, particularly arteries in the head and neck. Without prompt treatment, it can cause serious complications including sight loss and stroke.
Dr Ansalone's research will investigate a central question in GCA: why inflammation persists or returns in some patients despite treatment.
A particular focus will be the role of B-cell immune memory and its interaction with macrophages within the arterial wall.
By linking observations in diseased arteries with mechanistic experiments, the group aims to define the cellular networks that sustain inflammation and identify pathways that can be therapeutically disrupted.
A key ambition is to understand the biological differences between patients who respond well to treatment and those who develop persistent or relapsing disease.
Defining these disease states at a molecular and cellular level could help move GCA towards a more precise approach to treatment, in which therapies are guided by the mechanisms driving disease.
Dr Ansalone said: "Despite the severity of GCA, we still understand surprisingly little about the mechanisms driving persistent inflammation and relapse.
"Understanding how chronic and treatment-resistant inflammation persists within tissues remains one of the major unanswered questions across immune-mediated inflammatory diseases.
“This fellowship will allow me to expand patient-centred research in GCA and continue bridging biological mechanisms with therapeutic discovery.”
Although GCA will remain at the centre of the programme, the work will also examine whether the immune mechanisms responsible for persistent granulomatous inflammation are shared across other difficult-to-treat immune-mediated inflammatory diseases.
First published: 7 September 2026