The UK needs a steady pipeline of people who can turn stem cell science into working therapies, not just more lab discoveries. Each year, patients die preventable deaths because there are not enough organ donors and conventional treatments fall short. Regenerative medicine—creating biological substitutes for damaged tissue—could change that, but the field has a bottleneck: it lacks leaders who understand both the fundamental biology and the engineering, clinical, and commercial realities of making these therapies at scale. This grant does not fund a single experiment. Instead, it brings together six leading university teams—already funded through EPSRC’s Regenerative Medicine Doctoral Training Centres—to train a new generation of cross-disciplinary researchers. The programme spans fundamental cell biology, biological engineering, biomechanics, tissue engineering, bioprocessing, regulated manufacturing, and commercialisation. If it succeeds, the UK will have a cohort of professionals who can bridge the gap between a promising discovery in a petri dish and a manufactured therapy that reaches a patient. This is not about immediate products; it is about building the human infrastructure needed to make regenerative medicine a routine part of healthcare.
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Continued improvement in the nation's health depends upon the efficient development of affordable replacement human tissue and related therapies; an acute shortage of willing organ donors and the shortcomings of conventional therapies leads to the preventable death of many patients each year. The next healthcare revolution will apply regenerative medicines, creating biological therapies or substitutes for the replacement or restoration of tissue function lost through failure or disease. However, whilst science has revealed the potential, and early products have shown the power of such therapies, there is now a need for the long term supply of people properly trained with the necessary skills to lead the engineering and life science challenges before the predicted benefits in human healthcare can be realised. Realisation of these benefits requires a new generation of translational professional leaders immersed in both the fundamental science of these new products and the clinical, engineering and commercial realities of their creation and application.This proposal brings together for the first time the six University teams, and the associated growing cohorts of young researchers, involved in the two Regenerative Medicine DTCs funded through the EPSRC Life Sciences Interface Programme. Each University group is independently internationally leading in their field, and has attracted significant funding from the EPSRC Life Sciences Interface Programme and elsewhere. The proposed Landscape Award offers the opportunity to combine the research strengths of the six groups to deliver a strategic collaborative programme of cross-disciplinary research, and a cohort of future research leaders in tissue engineering and regenerative medicine. The proposed research programme is truly cross-disciplinary, requiring expertise that ranges from fundamental cell biology, through biological engineering, biomechanics and tissue engineering, to bioprocessing, regulated manufacturing, and commercialisation.
Alicia El Haj (Co-Investigator)Chris Hewitt (Co-Investigator)David John Williams (Principal Investigator)John Fisher (Co-Investigator)Kevin Shakesheff (Co-Investigator)Paul Genever (Co-Investigator)Sheila MacNeil (Co-Investigator)Zhongmin Jin (Co-Investigator)
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