Lucia Celkova, PhD

Dr. Lucia Celkova is a current postdoctoral research fellow in the Immunobiology Research Group at Trinity College Dublin. In her career to date, she has specialized in elucidating the role of innate immune responses at epithelial and endothelial barriers to identify novel therapeutic targets to prevent disease. She gained her PhD degree from Trinity College Dublin, working in the Neurovascular Genetics Laboratory on the role of blood-retina barrier regulation and sterile inflammation in retinal health and disease. She contributed to characterizing the role of IL-18 in retinal neovascularization as well as to discovery of the inner blood-retina barrier circadian cycling and its disruption leading to dry AMD-like pathology. In her most recent work, she identified IL-36 as an anti-permeability factor in the experimental model of wet AMD, implicating IL-36 as a potential new therapy for neovascular retinal diseases. She co-authored several peer-reviewed publications and is a joint inventor on an IP portfolio related to regulation of the inner blood-retina barrier to prevent AMD, which has now been granted in the US jurisdiction. During her time in vision research, Lucia has grown particularly passionate about the RPE and the crosstalk between innate immune regulators and cell death driving RPE degeneration. She is hoping to establish for herself a niche area within the fascinating field of RPE biology and become an independent ophthalmology research leader in the future.