The major goal of Philip Cohen’s research is to understand how the signal transduction networks that regulate the innate immune system are activated during infection by bacteria and viruses, and to discover how they trigger the production of inflammatory mediators to combat these pathogens. Understanding these signalling networks is important, not just because it may lead to the development of improved drugs to fight infection, but also because failure to control the production of inflammatory mediators causes major global diseases, such as arthritis, asthma, colitis, fibrosis, lupus, psoriasis and sepsis. A further aim of his research is therefore to identify which components of these signalling networks are attractive drug targets for the treatment of these diseases. Another focus is to understand the interplay between protein phosphorylation and protein ubiquitylation in regulating the innate immune system, which we tackle by using a range of state-of-the-art techniques that include molecular, cellular and chemical biology, protein chemistry, mass spectrometry, CRISPR/Cas9 gene-editing technology and mouse genetics.