Brian Bigger | Professor of Advanced Therapeutics
University of Edinburgh

Brian was educated at The University of Bath and Imperial College London, and established a lab at the University of Manchester, later moving to the University of Edinburgh in 2024. The Bigger lab has worked on the pathology, biomarkers and treatments of mucopolysaccharide diseases for over 20 years. The lab develops lentiviral stem cell gene therapies, iPS cell neural stem cell gene therapies and AAV gene therapies for childhood dementias, including Sanfilippo diseases and Hunter disease. The lab has a strong translational focus, with two stem cell gene therapy clinical trials underway in Manchester and a third planned in California. Brian’s lab was the first to show the role of the inflammasome in neurodegeneration in lysosomal diseases, and IL1RA in preventing this. Brian co-founded Orchard Therapeutics and was Chairman of the European Study Group for Lysosomal Diseases.  He recently received the Royal College of Pathologists Galea Prize and was named in the 2026 TIME100 Health list of the World’s Most Influential People in Health for his work in developing a blood-brain-barrier crossing gene therapy for Hunter disease.