Ten Feizi facts for kids

Ten Feizi, born in 1937, is a brilliant scientist from Cyprus and Britain. She is a professor and leads the Glycosciences Laboratory at Imperial College London. She studies tiny sugar chains called glycans, looking at how they are built and what jobs they do in our bodies. Her amazing work has earned her many awards, including the Society for Glycobiology Rosalind Kornfeld award in 2014 and a special fellowship from the Academy of Medical Sciences in 2021. In May 2021, she was also chosen as a Fellow of the Royal Society.

Early Life and Learning

Ten Feizi was born in 1937 in Nicosia, Cyprus. She went to school there before moving to London to study even more. She studied medicine at the Royal Free Medical School and finished with top honors in 1961.

After becoming a doctor, she worked at Hammersmith Hospital, helping with surgeries and studying blood. While there, she became very interested in a type of lung infection called atypical pneumonia. She noticed that many patients with this infection developed something called cold agglutinins in their blood. These are like confused antibodies that mistakenly stick to red blood cells. Dr. Feizi showed that a tiny germ called mycoplasma could make the body produce these confused antibodies.

She earned her MD degree at University College London. Her research focused on how mycoplasma pneumoniae caused these issues. Later, she joined Columbia University as a research fellow, where she worked with another scientist, Elvin A. Kabat, to learn more about glycans. She then became a research fellow at Rockefeller University, where she learned how to take out carbohydrates from cells.

Research and Discoveries

In 1973, Dr. Feizi joined the Medical Research Council Clinical Research Centre. She became the head of a section that studied Glycoconjugates. Eventually, she started her own special lab, the Imperial College London Glycosciences Laboratory. She became a full professor at Imperial College London in 1994.

Her early work looked closely at cold agglutinins, those confused antibodies that appear after mycoplasma pneumonia. She discovered that these antibodies stick to a specific part on red blood cells called the I antigen. Working with another scientist, Sen-itiroh Hakomori, she found that this I antigen was actually part of a carbohydrate chain.

Dr. Feizi also studied how the I antigen was connected to mycoplasma. She showed that a specific type of sugar chain acts like a landing spot for mycoplasma. This helps the I antigen guide the mycoplasma to the cell. Her team was also the first to figure out the structure of a key protein from the HIV virus and how it interacts with other parts of the body.

Glycans and Disease

Dr. Feizi showed that by looking at anti-li blood group antibodies, scientists could track changes in how cells grow and how normal cells turn into cancer cells. She also studied how animal lectins (proteins that bind to sugars) attach to oligosaccharides (short sugar chains).

Her interest in how glycans are built and how they are recognized led her to create a new way to study them. Dr. Feizi developed a special system called the neoglycolipid (NGL)-based oligosaccharide microarray. This system allowed her to look at a huge variety of glycans, specific cells, and proteins. In 2002, her system was the first to study entire glycomes, which are all the glycans in a living thing.

Her glycoarray system, supported by the Wellcome Trust, is one of the most varied in the world. It helps scientists better understand how germs interact with our bodies and how glycans and proteins work together in diseases. This system has been used to find the cell receptors for viruses like SV40 and Influenza A virus subtype H1N1.

Awards and Honors

Dr. Ten Feizi has received many important awards for her scientific work:

• 1994 American Society for Clinical Pathology Outstanding Research Award
• 2014 Society for Glycobiology Rosalind Kornfeld Lifetime Achievement Award
• 2020 Royal Society of Chemistry Carbohydrate Group Haworth Memorial Lectureship

She is also a Fellow of several important groups, including the Academy of Medical Sciences, the Royal College of Physicians, and the Royal College of Pathologists.