CRMD Newsletter Spring 2020

The recent lockdown of the laboratories because of the Covid-19 pandemic has not stopped our Centre to work towards its objectives. Thanks to the work of our researchers, 2020 has started for us with good news on many fronts.

In the first three months of the year, four open access papers were published in key priority areas of our research:

The 3D Med project supported by the i3 England and led by Prof Marco Marengo will start the research activities as soon as possible. In the meantime, a selection process of excellent candidates led to the appointment of Dr. Vahid Bazargan as senior research fellow. Welcome among us Vahid! We look forward to having you with us at the start of this exciting project. This project is another positive outcome of the past strategic investment made by the Centre to generate ideas and preliminary data relevant to the i3 England proposal.

Congratulations also to Mrs Rachel Forss for the significant progress she made on various fronts of her exciting research. In the last few months Rachel secured the ethical approval for testing the human wound odour capturing potential of carbon dressings developed by Dr Iain Allan in the Interreg project DERMA. Data have been collected and they are currently being analysed.

The ethical approval for a study on animal wound exudates (which is a preliminary study before repeating the same method with human exudate / wound samples) has also been achieved. Control samples have been processed 2 contributing veterinaries will start providing samples to the study.

In collaboration with Nadia Terrazini, also researcher of our Centre, Rachel is also working on a fungal mycobiome project using 3rd generation DNA sequencing. NHS ethical approval has been obtained, and samples from Leaf Hospital patients have been collected for the pilot study. The DNA sequencing aims to provide clinicians with a more in-depth analysis of the wound.

Welcome to Adam Farmer who has recently started his PhD on mathematical models of cell migration and aggregation. Adam will be supervised by Dr Paul Harris who has recently published two papers on the same topic and by Dr Manolia Andredaki and Prof Matteo Santin.

We also look forward to seeing the progress made by two projects funded by the budget of our

Centre in 2018/19 and 2019/20. The first is led by Prof Mara Cercignani and Prof Peter Watt and it is entitled ‘Objective and Subjective Assessment of fatigue in multiple sclerosis’. Mara and team had already achieved the ethical approval, recruited control subjects and collected Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) data from them at the time of lockdown. The second was announced in the December 2019 newsletter and it is led by Dr Wendy Macfarlane. Its title is: GlycoTrain Technology for Improved Outcomes in Patients with Gestational Diabetes. We look forward to seeing the outcomes of such exciting projects.

Exciting data had been collected at the time of lockdown by one of our undergraduate final year project students, Ms Rozie Suleman. Using substrates produced and donated to her by our commercial partner Tissue Click Ltd, Rozie was able to induce the assembling of lung cells and vascular endothelial cells into lung-alveoli structures, a research of high relevance for studies on Covid-19.

Stay safe!

Prof Matteo Santin, Director

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