Dr Ashley Toye

Dr Ashley Toye is a Senior Lecturer of Erythrocyte Biology in the School of Biochemistry at Bristol and is a NHSBT Principal Investigator. Prior to this position he held a NHSBT Wellcome Trust Career Development award (2005-2010). Dr Toye’s lab is focused the study and manipulation of erythropoiesis in health and disease. In particular, he is investigating the biogenesis of the specialized red blood cell membrane. He is using synthetic biology approaches with the goal of generating novel therapeutics from in vitro produced reticulocytes. Research highlights includes development of an in vitro erythroid culture system (Haematologica 2010), which increases the overall yield of reticulocytes generated from human peripheral blood by culturing the CD34- cell population which was used to describe membrane protein complex assembly (Blood, 2011) and membrane sorting (Plos One 2013 and Haematologica 2015). He has pioneered the culture of blood samples taken from patients with rare diseases and the manipulation of erythroblast protein expression(Haematologica 2010;2013; 2014). He has published 36 peer reviewed papers and been individually awarded over £3M since 2010 to study erythrocyte biology and erythropoiesis. He is a Co- PI on the £13M BrisSynBio application. He also recently led the successful bid for £3M for a Bristol NIHR Blood and Transplant Research Unit (BTRU) to conduct a clinical trial of in vitro produced red blood cells.