Articles about 'Wellcome Trust-CRUK Gurdon Institute'

Scientists at AstraZeneca, a global biopharmaceutical company, have been working with Cambridge University for more than two decades. What are the secrets of their success?

A newly-discovered molecular mechanism that allows damaged adult liver cells to regenerate could pave the way for drugs to treat conditions such as cirrhosis or other chronic liver diseases where regeneration is impaired. 

Dr Kate Dry is Information Specialist in Professor Steve Jackson’s Lab at the Gurdon Institute. Here, she tells us about unexpected career paths, working in science while raising a family, and being a member of a world-leading cancer research lab. 

To mark LGBTSTEM Day, celebrating lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer scientists, engineers and mathematicians around the world, our researchers tell us why celebrating diversity is important – and why identities really do matter. 

Researchers at the University of Cambridge have uncovered a specialised population of skin cells that coordinate tail regeneration in frogs. These ‘Regeneration-Organizing Cells’ help to explain one of the great mysteries of nature and may offer clues about how this ability might be achieved in mammalian tissues.

Researchers have discovered that honey bees are able to share immunity with other bees and to their offspring in a hive by transmitting RNA ‘vaccines’ through royal jelly and worker jelly. The jelly is the bee equivalent of mother’s milk: a secretion used to provide nutrition to worker and queen bee larvae. 

Evidence has been building in recent years that our diet, our habits or traumatic experiences can have consequences for the health of our children – and even our grandchildren. The explanation that has gained most currency for how this occurs is so-called ‘epigenetic inheritance’ – patterns of chemical ‘marks’ on or around our DNA that are hypothesised to be passed down the generations. But new research from the University of Cambridge suggests that this mechanism of non-genetic inheritance is likely to be very rare.

A team of researchers at the University of Cambridge has identified a protein complex that might explain why some cancer patients treated with the revolutionary new anti-cancer drugs known as PARP inhibitors develop resistance to their medication.

The past few years has seen an explosion in the number of studies using organoids – so-called ‘mini organs’. While they can help scientists understand human biology and disease, some in the field have questioned their usefulness. But as the field matures, we could see their increasing use in personalised and regenerative medicine.

Scientists have created mini biological models of human primary liver cancers, known as organoids, in the lab for the first time. In a paper published in Nature Medicine, the tiny laboratory models of tumours were used to identify a new drug that could potentially treat certain types of liver cancer.