̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge - Stephen O’Rahilly

Are weight loss jabs the solution to the obesity crisis?

jg533 — Wed, 30 Oct 2024 10:50:43 +0000

Almost two thirds of UK adults are overweight or obese. Are weight loss drugs the solution? Cambridge experts share their opinions.

Wellcome awards Cambridge £18 million for two Discovery Research Platforms

cjb250 — Wed, 03 May 2023 23:01:48 +0000

̽��ֱ��Discovery Research Platforms (DRPs) will be home to transformative research environments that empower researchers to overcome specific barriers holding back progress in their fields of research. They aim to accelerate research for the benefit of the wider global research community, with researchers and teams developing new tools, knowledge and capabilities to help unlock new findings about life, health and wellbeing.

Michael Dunn, Director of Discovery Research at Wellcome, said: “Discovery research is essential to advancing our ability to understand and improve health. But in addition to researchers’ bold and imaginative ideas, we know that new tools, methods and capabilities are also needed to unlock new avenues of research that can disrupt and transform the research landscape globally.”

̽��ֱ��two Cambridge DRPs, which will receive £9million each over seven years, are:

̽��ֱ��Discovery Research Platform for Tissue Scale Biology – which seeks to move stem cell biology to the tissue and organ scale of research, creating a new network of local and international researchers to enable strategies that capitalise on new in vitro models to develop better treatments for human patients.

Professor Bertie Gottgens, Director of the Wellcome-MRC Cambridge Stem Cell Institute, said: "I am delighted that Wellcome will support our ambition to build a new Discovery Research Platform to provide international leadership for Tissue Scale Biology.

“Our vision for this platform resulted from extensive discussions across the wider Cambridge Stem Cell community and the formation of a highly interdisciplinary team connecting the Cambridge Stem Cell Institute with the West Cambridge Engineering/Technology community. It also incorporates exciting new training partnerships with Anglia Ruskin ̽��ֱ�� and the Cambridge Academy for Science and Technology, to help us fill critical skills shortages and widen participation across Cambridge."

̽��ֱ��Discovery Research Platform for Integrating Metabolic and Endocrine Science – which aims to address practical barriers preventing data integration across metabolic and endocrine science, investigate how hormones control metabolic processes and how these can go wrong in disorders such as obesity, diabetes and cachexia, and create tools to facilitate global access to this data. ̽��ֱ��Platform will encompass research on molecules, cells and model organisms but will have a major focus on discovery science in human participants, patients and populations.

̽��ֱ��funding will sustain key technological platforms and the highly-trained staff needed to support these. It will also underpin partnerships with research centres across the UK as well as in Germany and Denmark, all of which will provide new opportunities for training.

̽��ֱ��Platform will have a major focus on the broad dissemination of integrated data and the creation of tools to facilitate access by the global community. ̽��ֱ��award will also accelerate the team’s drive to make transformational changes to research culture with new initiatives in widening access and open science reinforced by a new programme of research into the culture of biomedical science, in collaboration with Dr Yeun Joon Kim, Associate Professor at the Cambridge Judge Business School.

Professor Sir Stephen O’Rahilly, Co-Director at the Wellcome-MRC Institute of Metabolic Science and Director of the MRC Metabolic Diseases Unit, said: “Wellcome’s support of our scientists’ research in metabolism and endocrinology, and of the technological platforms that underpin it, has been critically important to the discoveries we have made and the translation of that research into improvements in health. This new award will allow us to build on those achievements and deliver more ground-breaking science in a manner that emphasises openness, diversity and a spirit of collaboration.”

Cambridge has been awarded two of Wellcome’s eight new Discovery Research Platforms, the global charitable foundation announced today.

Odra Noel

Acinar tissue - ̽��ֱ��flowers of diabetes

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Female scientists lead Cambridge success in Royal Society awards 2021

ta385 — Tue, 24 Aug 2021 12:00:00 +0000

Bell Burnell is one of twelve former and current Cambridge researchers, including six women, to be recognised in 2021 for their exceptional research and outstanding contributions to science.

Dame Jocelyn has been honoured for her work on the discovery of pulsars in the 1960s while she was a postgraduate student at New Hall (now Murray Edwards College) carrying out research at Cambridge's Cavendish Laboratory.

Past winners of the Copley Medal have included Charles Darwin, Albert Einstein and Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin. Dame Jocelyn said: “I am delighted to be the recipient of this year’s Copley Medal, a prize which has been awarded to so many incredible scientists.

“With many more women having successful careers in science, and gaining recognition for their transformational work, I hope there will be many more female Copley winners in the near future.

“My career has not fitted a conventional – male – pattern. Being the first person to identify pulsars would be the highlight of any career; but I have also swung sledgehammers and built radio telescopes; set up a successful group of my own studying binary stars; and was the first female president of the Institute of Physics and of the Royal Society of Edinburgh.

“I hope that my work and presence as a senior woman in science continues to encourage more women to pursue scientific careers”.

̽��ֱ��Copley Medal award includes a £25,000 gift which Dame Jocelyn will add to the Institute of Physics' Bell Burnell Graduate Scholarship Fund, which provides grants to graduate students from under-represented groups in physics.

Three female scientists currently working at Cambridge have been recognised in 2021. Professor Sadaf Farooqi from the MRC Metabolic Diseases Unit receives the Croonian Medal and Lecture, together with Sir Stephen O'Rahilly, for their seminal discoveries regarding the control of human body weight, resulting in novel diagnostics and therapies, which improve human health.

Dr Serena Nik-Zainal from the MRC Cancer Unit has been awarded the Francis Crick Medal and Lecture, for her contributions to understanding the aetiology of cancers by her analyses of mutation signatures in cancer genomes, which is now being applied to cancer therapy.

Professor Anne Ferguson-Smith from the Department of Genetics and currently the ̽��ֱ��’s Pro-Vice-Chancellor for Research receives the Buchanan Medal, for her pioneering work in epigenetics, her interdisciplinary work on genomic imprinting, the interplay between the genome and epigenome, and how genetic and environmental influences affect development and human diseases.

Former Cavendish Laboratory Research Fellow, Professor Michelle Simmons, has won the Bakerian Medal and Lecture, for her seminal contributions to our understanding of nature at the atomic-scale by creating a sequence of world-first quantum electronic devices in which individual atoms control device behaviour.

Professor Frances Kirwan, alumna and Honorary Fellow of Clare College, received the Sylvester Medal, for her research on quotients in algebraic geometry, including links with symplectic geometry and topology, which has had many applications.

Other current Cambridge researchers honoured include Dr Sjors Scheres from the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology. Scheres has been awarded the Leeuwenhoek Medal and Lecture for his ground-breaking contributions and innovations in image analysis and reconstruction methods in electron cryo-microscopy, enabling the structure determination of complex macromolecules of fundamental biological and medical importance to atomic resolution.

Emeritus Professor Michael Green from the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics has been awarded Royal Medal A for crucial and influential contributions to the development of string theory over a long period, including the discovery of anomaly cancellation.

̽��ֱ��Royal Society’s President, Sir Adrian Smith, said: “Through its medals and awards the Royal Society recognises those researchers and science communicators who have played a critical part in expanding our understanding of the world around us.”

“From advancing vaccine development to catching the first glimpses of distant pulsars, these discoveries shape our societies, answer fundamental questions and open new avenues for exploration.”

Find the full list of 2021 Royal Society medal, award and prize winners here.

Professor Dame Jocelyn Bell Burnell has become only the second woman to be awarded the Royal Society’s prestigious Copley Medal, the world’s oldest scientific prize.

I hope there will be many more female Copley winners in the near future

Jocelyn Bell Burnell

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z_3zNw91MSY

Professor Dame Jocelyn Bell Burnell

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"Academic Incubator" to develop new medicines of value

bjb42 — Mon, 01 Sep 2008 09:00:10 +0000

̽��ֱ��ground-breaking concept of the ‘Academic Incubator’ will tap into the highest quality thinking in academia to optimise the early clinical development of new GSK medicines in a model of shared risk and reward. ̽��ֱ��new agreement provides a framework for a team of academic experts led by Professors Ed Bullmore, Barry Everitt, Trevor Robbins, Paul Fletcher and Stephen O’Rahilly, from the Departments of Psychiatry and Experimental Psychology and the Institute of Metabolic Science, to develop a novel centrally acting agent with therapeutic potential for obesity and addictive disorders.

"Sometimes drug development needs to cut across traditional boundaries, and the development of drugs that act on the brain to deliver health benefits in terms of reduced body weight is a good example," said Professor Bullmore. " ̽��ֱ�� ̽��ֱ�� has established expertise in both neuroscience and metabolic science and, importantly, there is already a strong track record of interdisciplinary research between these groups. This was particularly attractive to GSK as a scientific environment to support the innovative development of centrally acting anti-obesity drugs."

Although Cambridge is the first academic institution to pioneer the incubator model of working with GSK, it is not expected to be the only one if the model proves successful here. Clinicians and scientists at carefully selected academic institutions worldwide will be expected to challenge industry norms and set a unique path for preclinical and early clinical development activities that will deliver on the promise of an asset at the earliest stage. Importantly, the agreement also allows the academic scientists freedom to publish results arising from their work on incubator projects.

‘This puts academia–industry relationships on a new footing and allows academics who are leaders in their fields the opportunity to become directly involved in developing medicines for patients and to have the freedom to take the programme in exciting new directions,’ said Patrick Vallance, Senior Vice President, Drug Discovery at GSK. In support of all its incubator projects, GSK will provide operational support, access to in-house clinical research and imaging facilities, and background preclinical data on the drug. For incubator projects based in Cambridge, an important component of GSK’s support for the academic teams will be provided by the facilities and staff of GSK’s Clinical Unit Cambridge. ̽��ֱ��Unit is embedded in the Cambridge Biomedical Campus in close physical proximity to departments of the School of Clinical Medicine and the Wellcome Trust Clinical Research Facility.

Patrick Sissons, Regius Professor of Physic and Head of the School of Clinical Medicine in Cambridge, said: "We place great value on our relationship with GSK and are delighted to be working with them in this innovative new partnership between leading clinical scientists in the ̽��ֱ�� and industry."

For more information, please contact Professor Ed Bullmore (etb23@cam.ac.uk).

GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) has signed its first agreement with the ̽��ֱ�� to optimise the early clinical development of new GSK medicines for obesity and addictive disorders.

Sometimes drug development needs to cut across traditional boundaries, and the development of drugs that act on the brain to deliver health benefits in terms of reduced body weight is a good example,

Ed Bullmore

̽��ֱ��Wandering Angel

Mouths

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