AN OXFORD biologist who has devoted her career to better understanding the human gut is to receive a prestigious international prize worth nearly half-a- million pounds.

Prof Fiona Powrie will receive the 2012 Louis-Jeantet Prize for Medicine, awarded for her work on the interactions between the bacterial intestinal flora and the immune system.

The biologist, who is Sidney Truelove Professor of Gastro-enterology at Oxford University and head of experimental medicine at the Nuffield Department of Medicine at the John Radcliffe Hospital, has been given the award, worth 700,000 Swiss francs, both to celebrate the work already done and to fund further research.

Prof Powrie, 49, from Harwell, said: “I’m absolutely thrilled.

“It’s a really excellent prize and great recognition for myself but also the field I have been working in for a long time.

“The prize is not really so much for what I’ve done but for areas that they think have got potential and it allows me to be able to continue my work.”

As well as helping fund the work Prof Powrie herself is doing, it will enable her to recruit three additional members of staff, postdoctoral scientists and trainees, to look at the causes and treatments of inflammatory bowel disease, which affects about 1 in 1,000 people.

Prof Powrie said: “I didn’t ask for this, it is just something that has been awarded which is wonderful.

“Usually you go to a lot of trouble to apply to funding agencies so it is a delight to be told that I’m going to get this.”

The biologist carried out her PhD in immunology at Oxford and after a stint in America, returned to the city in 1996.

She identified cells that police the immune response in the intestine, stopping our defence system attacking bacteria that are good for the human body, and demonstrated how deficiencies in those cells could lead to chronic intestinal inflammatory disease.

She said: “The end goal is to be able to understand why, in some individuals, the relationship between the gut and our immune system breaks down and they develop these very debilitating diseases. By understanding the scientific mechanisms we might be able to develop more therapies.”

Prof Powrie, who will receive the prize at a ceremony in Geneva in April, will be the 25th UK and 76th European researcher to be presented with the accolade since its launch in 1986.