He continued with postdoctoral research in the field of gene structure and expression at the Laboratory of Gene Structure and Expression, National Institute for Medical Research, Mill Hill, London, UK, and from 1990 to 2000 he established the Laboratory of Molecular Genetics at the Hellenic Pasteur Institute in Athens, Greece.
Further work in his lab provided insights into the function of TNF in host defense and the structure and function of secondary lymphoid organs, a work that more recently evolved into the establishment of TNFRI and NFkB signals specifically in follicular dendritic cells (FDCs) being of pivotal significance in the regulation of humoral B cell responses and autoimmunity.
[5] Animal models developed in his lab have been distributed to numerous academic and industrial laboratories around the world (over 200 MTAs in the last ten years).
[9] From 2005 - 2009 Dr. Kollias coordinated a consortium of 24 EU organizations constituting the FP6 Network of Excellence MUGEN ("Functional Genomics in mutant mouse models as tools to investigate the complexity of human immunological disease", 11M€).
[10] He is currently a core member of the Innovative Medicines Initiative (IMI) project BeTheCure (Total budget: 38 M€, 2011–2016)[11][12] and has recently been awarded a 2013 Advanced ERC grant to study the role of mesenchymal cells in intestinal tissue homeostasis and pathophysiology.