Profile

I’m a Healthcare Engineer working on developing new manufacturing methods for making Regenerative Therapies that can help the body to fix itself. Probably the best known regenerative therapy is a bone marrow transplant which is used to help patients who have leukaemia. Many regenerative therapies contain cells, either stem cells or cells that have been grown from stem cells.

My research combines biological and medical research with cutting edge engineering. I work to provide new solutions to barriers in making cell-based medicines (regenerative therapies). Many of the barriers we face are around “scale-up” which involves changing the manufacturing process from a small volume to a much larger volume. As well as from a hands-on method (which takes up a lot of our time) to a hands-off method where we can use robots to do the work for us. These changes make the process more controlled, quicker and cheaper. This will allow companies to be able to safely make the required volumes of the therapy to treat the many patients who need it.

I work with companies to develop and use new robotic technologies for growing cells. One of our robots is called the CompacT SelecT (made by a company called TAP Biosystems) and I use it to grow cells in larger volumes in quicker time. Some cells grow better if they are moved around, these cells are grown in bioreactors which stir the cells up, for example blood cells – which grow under flow conditions in our bloodstream. We have another robot called the advanced microscale bioreactor (ambr, also made by TAP Biosystems) and we have used it to grow blood cells. The ambr automatically looks after 24 mini bioreactors; one bioreactor can fit in the palm of your hand. The robot automatically stirs the bioreactors and can sense changes within them so it can keep the cells at their favourite temperature and medium conditions (pH, oxygen content). I work with the robot to add cells or medium to the bioreactors or take samples to measure growth.

If you want to know more about my work:

I’m a member of the HEART team and you can keep up to date with our goings on at the Healthcare Engineering And Regenerative Therapies (HEART) blog here (http://www.heartblog.net/). Look out for posts on my work into Gene Therapy and Synthetic Biology in the next few weeks!
I’m a lead researcher for the EPSRC Centre in Innovative Manufacturing in Regenerative Medicine: http://www.epsrc-regen-med.org/

My days can be very different, some days I can be doing teaching activities for the University.

Other days I could be travelling for my work. Meeting with companies or going to scientific conferences where lots of scientists meet up, share their work and come up with new ideas and ways of working together.

Sometimes I have a lot of writing to do. This can be writing scientific papers or writing applications for money from the government and companies to be able to continue my research.

I work on many different projects at once. At the moment I’m working on three different projects. Generally I’m working on something different every day which makes it all really interesting.