• Question: What is the most interesting thing you have found out?

    Asked by jenniferlf2002 to Claire, Elizabeth, Manolis, Mark, Zach on 14 Mar 2014.
    • Photo: Mark Wallace

      Mark Wallace answered on 14 Mar 2014:

      That I can make a copy of the membrane (the outer layer) of your cells using oil and water.

    • Photo: Zach Dixon

      Zach Dixon answered on 14 Mar 2014:

      That the cells I am working on are not resistant to a particular drug – despite them lacking an important part of their DNA (instructions that tell the cell how to behave)!

    • Photo: Claire Vinten

      Claire Vinten answered on 14 Mar 2014:

      That vets do not know how they make the decisions that they make when they are looking after an animal. Also that we do not let student vets practice making decisions – they have to just do it for the first time when they get their first job.

    • Photo: Elizabeth Ratcliffe

      Elizabeth Ratcliffe answered on 14 Mar 2014:

      Hi jennifererlf2002,
      that I can reliably tell within an hour whether defrosted stem cells will live or die….
      We have to freeze cells to be able to store them, this happens several times in the process to make a regenerative therapy, for example at the beginning when we harvest the cells from the patient and at the end when the cells need to be transferred back to the hospital.
      The problem is some types of cells don’t like being frozen and we get really poor recovery because lots of them die. We can defrost the cells and they seem fine but a day or so later they all start to die – this is called delayed onset cell death. The problems around this are really complex and not fully understood by current science. There is no way to tell when you defrost a sample whether its going to be a good defrost or a bad defrost….until now!
      I’ve developed a new technique with my lab buddies to be able to reliably measure the cells within 1 hour after defrost and know whether they will live or not…and be able to put a number on this (which is really important). The technique can also be used to take a bad defrost and make it better so we can recover more cells even from bad samples.
      This is really very important because getting stem cells from patients can be difficult and we don’t get many so we don’t want to lose any at the beginning of the process. We don’t want to lose any at the end of the process when we’ve made the medicine either as it might not work as well as it could in treating disease

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