Advanced therapies for regenerative medicine

A new training programme at King’s College London will embed PhD students directly into the laboratories and clinics that are turning cell transplants, gene therapies, and tissue repair techniques into real treatments for patients. Regenerative medicine—repairing or replacing damaged organs and tissues—has long promised to transform how we treat heart disease, blindness, and degenerative conditions. But the field has struggled to move discoveries from the lab bench to the bedside. The bottleneck is not just scientific: it is a shortage of researchers who understand both the fundamental biology and the practical steps needed to manufacture therapies, run clinical trials, and navigate commercial pathways. This programme tackles that gap head-on. Students spend their first year rotating through three different labs while taking taught courses and master classes, earning an MRes before committing to a three-year PhD project. Supervisors span clinical and non-clinical disciplines, from early-career to senior researchers. Partner organisations offer secondments for additional real-world training. If it succeeds, the programme will produce a cohort of scientists fluent in translation—able to design a gene therapy in the lab and understand what it takes to deliver it to a patient. Over time, that could accelerate the pipeline of regenerative treatments reaching the NHS.