Stem Cell Biology

Building on work carried out at The University of Manchester prior to the group moving to Nottingham in 2015 and taking advantage of local strengths in stem cell biology, gene editing and stem cell functional characterisation, this work has progressed rapidly.

This includes collaborations with Dr David Turner in Liverpool, Prof. Jenny Nichols in Edinburgh and Jesse Veenvliet in Dresden with whom we are working to access gastruloid models of early development, with projects currently funded by NC3Rs, 'Exploring the role of matrix encapsulation on early developmental decisions using non-animal sourced hydrogels' and 'Optimising human stem cell models to decipher signals and responses during organogenesis.'

We are also working with local teams and Dr James Smith at the University of East Anglia to better understand the role of proteoglycans and GAGs in the specification of selected lineages. A recent development from this work is a new collaboration with Prof. Ramiro Alberio with whom we are co-supervising a PhD student to optimise matrices for the creation of cultured meat.

This work has progressed rapidly since the group moved to the University of Nottingham in 2015. Much of our early work was around developing a non-animal derived hydrogel that provided a fully-defined, controllable and reproducible matrix that we could use to encapsulate cells to study the composition, distribution and function of the matrix deposited (the benefits of this are discussed in the 3Rs resource library) .

We benefitted from multiple projects funded by NC3Rs, including collaborations with Dr Gillian Farnie, with Prof. Rob Clarke at the Manchester Breast Cancer Centre, and with Prof. Val Speirs at the University of Aberdeen. As well as strong interactions with Prof. Neil Thomas from the School of Chemistry.

Dr Jenny Ashworth, who was a PDRA on the initial project went on to be highly commended by NC3Rs for her publication on the hydrogels and to win a competitive Nottingham Research Fellowship to develop her independent research.

We’ve built a long-standing, productive and hugely enjoyable with other researchers in Nottingham working on cancer and the cancer microenvironment including Prof. Anna Grabowska (e.g. supervising an NC3Rs -funded student), Prof. Cinzia Allegrucci, Dr Alex Thompson, and Dr Beth Coyle as well as others. The hydrogels can also be used to model other tissues, including fibrotic tissue in organs such as the lung (work with Dr. Nick Hannan)

With additional funding from BBSRC (ICURe) and Innovate UK Dr John Curd from the group will shortly be spinning-out our hydrogel technology to more effectively share it with the community.

This is a particularly exciting area where we can take full advantage of the fertile research environment provided by the Biodiscovery Institute and the networks within Nottingham.  We’ve benefitted from a strong collaboration with Prof. Amanda Wright in Engineering with whom we worked as part of a large, multi-centre collaborative to build OptoRheo to allow simultaneous in situ micro-mechanical sensing and imaging of live 3D biological systems.

We have also worked with Dr Andrew Hook in Pharmacy to develop a ToF-SIMS based method of GAG compositional analysis that can detect subtle changes in very small amounts of material, highly relevant given the long-standing problems with the supply chain of pharmaceutical heparin, sourced from animals (Hook et al).

More recently, we have been working with Dr Kenton Arkill and colleagues from the Nanoscale and Microscale Research Centre to innovate in the in situ detection of GAGs in cell and tissue samples with limited/no sample preparation.