-
Asked by jazminp to Anzy, Aoife, Dave, Matt, Tomasz on 15 Nov 2013.
-
David Christensen answered on 15 Nov 2013:
My research is relatively abstract because I am trying to understand how embryonic stem cells work while they are stem cells before they differentiate to become other cell-types. This means that my research might help other scientists to grow embryonic stem cells in better conditions and understand what they need to feed to the cells. If scientists get better at growing embryonic stem cells, then it might become easier to control the way we grow them to produce treatments for disease. If we can give stem cell transplants to people with diseases like diabetes that affect their everyday life greatly, then we can help improve their lives enormously. This is still a long way off and my research is only a tiny piece of a puzzle that scientists are working on together all over the world.
-
-
Aoife O'Shaughnessy-Kirwan answered on 15 Nov 2013:
Hi jazminp,
My research will hopefully add to our knowledge about how organisms develop. The more we know the more helpful it is when we are looking at disease/thinking about treatment. Also, the protein I work on is incorrectly expressed in cancer so hopefully it can tell us something about the cancer process too. -
Matthew Tomlinson answered on 15 Nov 2013:
My work is focused on trying to improve how we repair broken bones that don’t heal well by themselves and with the aging population we have there are going to be more and more of these fractures. At the moment the best method we have to fix these breaks is to use something called a bone graft, which is where some bone is taken from a different part of the body (mainly the hip) and it is put into the break. This doesn’t work that well and you can get problems where the bone is taken out. If we can improve the methods to repair bones using stem cells then there will be no need to use this method anymore and people’s fractures will heal much faster.
Comments