David Foley has been shortlisted for the KickStart Digital Entrepreneur Award in the Converge Challenge, Scotland’s entrepreneurial development programme, for his proposed company, Elemental Therapeutics. The idea is to develop a new technology to tackle the challenge of oral drug delivery.
In the last 10-15 years stem cells have been catapulted from a relatively obscure research topic to the international limelight. Hardly a week goes by without some news story about a “ground breaking discovery” or “exciting new therapy” involving stem cells. Are these cells really as exciting as people think? What are they, where do they come from and how are they used in modern medicine? Why are private stem cell clinics springing up all over the world, and can they really deliver on their promises? What about the ethics of stem cell research?
The cattle disease nagana, also called African animal trypanosomiasis, caused by the parasites Trypanosoma vivax and Trypanosoma congolense, affects huge swathes of sub-Saharan Africa, and the T. vivax disease has also spread to South America. With around 60 million cattle at risk from the disease, which causes muscle wasting and death, the socio-economic impacts of T. vivax infections in livestock are profound.
The OME Team has been awarded a £1.4M Biomedical Resource Award from the Wellcome Trust to extend the capabilities of its Bio-Formats image file reading library. On receiving the award, Jason Swedlow, Professor of Quantitative Cell Biology and co-founder of OME said “the award is a recognition of the continuing growth of quantitative imaging in the life and biomedical sciences and the scientific community’s need for open source, community-driven tools for handling large, multidimensional image data sets.
Dr Sambit Nanda, a senior research scientist in the Medical Research Council’s Protein Phosphoryation and Ubiquitylation Unit (MRC-PPU) at the University of Dundee, has been awarded a research grant of £15,000 from Tenovus, Scotland to continue his exciting new research on inflammasomes.
Scientists from the University of Dundee have discovered a key regulator of embryonic stem cell identity, research that could one day lead to new treatments for heart attack patients and those with congenital heart conditions.
Embryonic stem cells have the potential to provide tissue replacement therapies for a number of debilitating diseases due to their capacity to differentiate into any cell type in the adult body, a property known as pluripotency.
Mitochondria are the essential energy-generating powerhouses that provide our cells with the energy of life. However, their malfunction has a dark side. Damaged mitochondria have the potential to release destructive reactive oxygen species that have serious and deleterious consequences for the cell. To cope with this, our cells have evolved a protective mechanism to prevent such a “mitochondrial meltdown”, by eliminating damaged mitochondria through a process termed mitophagy.
Dr Alessio Ciulli, from the Division of Biological Chemistry and Drug Discovery, in the School of Life Sciences at the University of Dundee is now a fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry (FRSC).
Third Year undergraduate, Sophie Cassidy, was successful in securing a paid 12 week internship with The Industrial Biotechnology Innovation Centre (IBioIC) through the Scotgrad Life Science summer internship programme and has written an account of her experience: http://www.scotgrad.co.uk/news/success-stories/learning-the-abcs-of-ibioic
Sophie will begin her 4th year of study towards her BSc Honours Degree in Biomedical Sciences in September.
Sensing that the site-visit on Wednesday August 3rd was important, barista Justine Torano, who operates the Caffeine Café in the Street, decided to customize her delicious cappuccinos with the Drug Discovery Unit ‘molecular structure’ logo – with a little help from the DDU’s Irene Hallyburton. This attention to detail and team spirit was not lost on the 14-strong VIP site-visit team, here to consider a proposal to create a Wellcome Trust Centre for Neglected Tropical Diseases Drug Discovery in Life Sciences.
