Marton Olbei

Marton Olbei is a Teaching Fellow at Imperial College London, where he uses systems biology to study immune signalling. His work centres on cytokines, the signalling proteins immune cells use to communicate and orchestrate immune responses, and how they influence one another. The broader aim is to apply this understanding to inflammatory bowel disease (IBD). Current IBD drugs target individual cytokines such as TNF and IL-23A, but responses are often not durable, which makes the wider signalling network important to understand. In his recent work on ulcerative colitis, a subtype of IBD, published in Science Signaling in 2026, he and collaborators built cytokine signalling networks from single-cell data taken from patient biopsies, and validated them in patient-derived organoids. The networks showed how cytokine signalling is rewired across different stages of disease and treatment, and identified TL1A, a cytokine that sits upstream of both TNF and IL-23A, as a potential new therapeutic