Author: Dr. Jonathan Appleby, PhD; Chief Scientific Officer, Cell and Gene Therapy Catapult, 14th May 2019. In November 2018, He Jiankui, gave a presentation at the second international summit on Human Genome Editing (1). During the presentation, social media led…
Author: Dr Alan Parker, 25th April 2019 Over the last few years a wave of virus-based therapies has progressed through late stage clinical evaluation and to (or near to) the market place. Therapeutic viruses are now being harnessed to correct…
Author: Alexandra McCarron, PhD student; Cystic Fibrosis Airway Research Group, University of Adelaide, 14th March 2019. Imagine a newborn baby. She looks perfectly healthy on the outside, but on the inside, her DNA contains one simple spelling error that causes…
Author: Subashan Vadibeler, Undergraduate Student; University of Malaya, 22nd February 2019 The very thought of an injury is enough to send chills running down the spine of those involved in sports. And we know exactly why this fear exists because…
Author: Beth MacLeod, Undergraduate Student; University of Dundee, 1st February 2019 We all have a universe inside our head. A hundred billion neurons making connections with one another, constantly firing and passing messages from our brain, down the spinal cord,…
Author: Helena Meyer-Berg; DPhil Student; University of Oxford I want to find a treatment for a disease. The disease is inevitably fatal within the first months of life, but it is rare. It only affects one in one million live…
Author: Alan Parker, 27th November 2017 Who’d be an Early Career Researcher (ECR) these days? Long gone are the halcyon days where you complete your PhD (commonly taking between 5 and 10 years to do so) then walk straight into…
Author: Professor Rafael J. Yáñez-Muñoz, Royal Holloway University of London Mitochondria produce ATP and are generally considered the powerhouses in the cells that make up the human body. They are vital to normal cell function and mitochondrial defects can…