̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge - School of Biological Sciences

Turbocharging the race to protect nature and climate with AI

lw355 — Sun, 06 Apr 2025 17:00:51 +0000

Rebalancing the planet must happen faster. Cambridge researchers are using AI to help.

Opinion: Humans should be at the heart of AI

lw355 — Thu, 03 Apr 2025 16:48:27 +0000

With the right development and application, AI could become a transformative force for good. What's missing in current technologies is human insight, says Anna Korhonen.

Researchers celebrated at the Cambridge Awards for Research Impact and Engagement

zs332 — Tue, 04 Feb 2025 08:09:41 +0000

̽��ֱ��Cambridge Awards for Research Impact and Engagement, formerly the Vice-Chancellor's Award, are held annually to recognise exceptional achievement, innovation, and creativity in developing research engagement and impact plans with significant economic, social, and cultural potential. Awarded in 3 categories, the winners for 2024 are:

Established Academic

Winner: Professor Sander van der Linden (Department of Psychology, School of Biological Sciences and Churchill College) and his team at the Cambridge Social Decision-Making Lab (Team application)

Project: A psychological vaccine against misinformation

Professor Sander van der Linden and team have developed a novel approach to countering the spread of harmful misinformation. This ‘psychological vaccine’ resulted in award-winning public impact tools that have shown millions of people how to spot fake news online. These games have been adopted by the World Health Organization, United Nations, UK Government and Google, and led to key policy changes in the EU Digital Services Act.

Early Career Researcher

Winner: Dr Gabriel Okello (Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership, School of Technology)

Project: Applying multidisciplinary, collaborative approaches to tackle air pollution in rapidly urbanising African cities

̽��ֱ��project catalysed Uganda’s first-ever air quality standards, advancing policy and public health. It drove transformative growth in the e-mobility sector and battery-swapping stations. ̽��ֱ��Clean Air Network was established as a multi-regional community of practice for air quality management across Africa. ̽��ֱ��platform now provides real-time air quality data enabling evidence-based decision-making in Uganda and 8 other African countries.

Collaboration Award

Winner:

Lead: Professor Paul Fletcher (Department of Psychiatry, School of Clinical Medicine, Clare College), Dr Dervila Glynn (Cambridge Neuroscience IRC), Dominic Matthews (Ninja Theory Ltd), Sharon Gilfoyle (Cambridgeshire and Peterborough NHS Foundation Trust)

Project: Representing psychosis in video games: communicating clinical science and tackling stigma

This work draws together expertise in video game design and clinical neuroscience, with lived experience of mental illness to co-produce two award-winning video games vividly conveying the nature of altered experience of reality in a character with psychosis. Within conversations around mental health, psychosis is neglected and highly stigmatised.

In creating a powerful character and telling her story through gameplay, the project has enabled sensitive and thoughtful conversations about psychosis, and mental illness in general. It has had a measurably positive impact on stigma.

More about the Cambridge Awards for Research Impact and Engagement

Find out more about the winning projects and meet our runners-up.

From helping to inoculate the public against misinformation to tackling air pollution in rapidly urbanising African cities, researchers from across the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge were honoured at the Cambridge Awards on 3 February.

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. Images, including our videos, are Copyright © ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge and licensors/contributors as identified. All rights reserved. We make our image and video content available in a number of ways – on our main website under its Terms and conditions, and on a range of channels including social media that permit your use and sharing of our content under their respective Terms.

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̽��ֱ��Cambridge Awards 2024 for Research Impact and Engagement

zs332 — Mon, 03 Feb 2025 10:27:01 +0000

Meet the winner of the Cambridge Awards 2024 for Research Impact and Engagement and learn more about their projects.

10 Cambridge spinouts forging a future for our planet

skbf2 — Fri, 25 Oct 2024 10:07:50 +0000

10 companies taking Cambridge ideas out of the lab and into the real world to address the climate emergency.

Cambridge and GSK announce new five-year collaboration aiming for improved outcomes for patients with hard-to-treat kidney and respiratory diseases

skbf2 — Sun, 20 Oct 2024 23:01:00 +0000

̽��ֱ��Cambridge-GSK Translational Immunology Collaboration (CG-TIC) combines ̽��ֱ�� and GSK expertise in the science of the immune system, AI and clinical development with access to patients and their data provided by Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� Hospitals.
GSK is investing more than £50 million in CG-TIC, further strengthening Cambridge’s position as Europe’s leading life sciences cluster.

GSK plc is making this investment to establish the Cambridge-GSK Translational Immunology Collaboration (CG-TIC), a five-year collaboration with the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge and Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� Hospitals. ̽��ֱ��collaboration is focused on understanding the onset of a disease, its progression, how patients respond to therapies and on developing biomarkers for rapid diagnosis. Ultimately, the goal is to trial more effective, personalised medicines.

̽��ֱ��collaboration will focus on kidney and respiratory diseases, both of which affect large numbers of people worldwide. Kidney disease is estimated to affect 850 million people (roughly 10% of the world’s population) (International Society of Nephrology) and chronic respiratory diseases around 545 million ( ̽��ֱ��Lancet).

Many types of kidney disease remain poorly understood and treatments, where they exist, tend to have limited efficacy. Chronic kidney disease is particularly unpleasant and debilitating for patients, often leading to end-stage disease. Treatments such as transplant and dialysis involve complex medical regimes and frequent hospital visits, making effective prevention and treatment the aim.

To make progress in treating these challenging disease areas, CG-TIC will apply an array of new techniques, including the use of cutting-edge single cell technologies to characterise how genes are expressed in individual cells. AI and machine learning have a critical role to play in transforming how data is combined and interrogated.

Using these techniques, the ambition is to be able to initiate new studies and early phase trials of new therapies for a number of hard-to-treat diseases which affect the kidneys. ̽��ֱ��same techniques will be applied to respiratory diseases and findings will be shared across the disease areas potentially to help identify and share better treatments across these different targets.

Peter Kyle, Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology, welcomed the collaboration: " ̽��ֱ��UK's life sciences industry is thriving, driving innovation and improving lives. This collaboration between GSK and the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge demonstrates our country's leading research and development capabilities.

“By focusing on cutting-edge research and harnessing the power of AI, this has the potential to advance the treatment of immune-related diseases, which could benefit patients both here in the UK and internationally. It's a clear example of how collaboration between industry, academia, and healthcare can deliver tangible results and strengthen the UK's position in healthcare innovation."

Tony Wood, Chief Scientific Officer, GSK, added: “Collaboration is at the heart of scientific progress and is fundamental to how we do R&D at GSK. We’re excited to build on our existing work with the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge to further this world-leading scientific and technological capability in the UK. By bringing together Cambridge’s expertise and our own internal capabilities, including understanding of the immune system and the use of AI to accelerate drug development, we have an opportunity to help patients struggling with complex disease.”

̽��ֱ��aim of CG-TIC is to improve outcomes for patients and Cambridge provides a unique environment in which to involve them, with Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� Hospitals playing a pivotal role in the collaboration and Royal Papworth Hospital NHS Foundation Trust, the UK’s leading heart and lung hospital, a likely future partner.

Home to the hospitals and to much of the collaboration’s research activity, the Cambridge Biomedical Campus provides a unique environment where academia, industry and healthcare can come together and where human translational research is supported by the National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR) Cambridge Biomedical Research Centre.

Professor Deborah Prentice, Vice-Chancellor of the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge, said: “ ̽��ֱ�� ̽��ֱ�� sits at the heart of Europe’s leading life sciences cluster, where excellent research and the NHS’s clinical resources combine with the talent generated by the many innovative bioscience companies that call Cambridge home. Through this very important collaboration with GSK, Cambridge will be able to drive economic growth for the UK while improving the health of people in this country and around the world.”

Roland Sinker, CEO of Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, also welcomed the collaboration, saying: “We are very excited to be part of this important partnership, which is another example of Cambridge experts working together to develop transformational new therapies, and use existing ones more precisely, to improve outcomes for patients with chronic and debilitating conditions.”

̽��ֱ��Cambridge-GSK Translational Immunology Collaboration will be co-led by Nicolas Wisniacki, VP, Clinical Research Head, GSK (above left) and David Thomas, Professor of Renal Medicine, ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge and principal investigator at the Cambridge Institute for Therapeutic Immunology and Infectious Diseases.

̽��ֱ��ambition of the partnership is to treat immune-related diseases more precisely with existing therapies and to rapidly develop new ones.

̽��ֱ��UK's life sciences industry is thriving, driving innovation and improving lives. This collaboration between GSK and the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge demonstrates our country's leading research and development capabilities.

Peter Kyle, Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology

StillVision

David Thomas, Professor of Renal Medicine, ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge and Dr Nicolas Wisniacki, VP, Clinical Research Head, GSK

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10 Cambridge spinouts changing the story of cancer

skbf2 — Thu, 17 Oct 2024 12:57:43 +0000

10 Cambridge spinouts on putting their research into practice to improve outcomes for cancer patients - and why Cambridge is a great place to do this.