Doctors can prescribe drugs to stop disease from getting worse, but they have almost nothing that repairs damage already done to tissues and organs. The Edinburgh Centre for Regenerative Medicine brings together biologists, engineers, and clinicians to change that by studying how stem cells behave inside living tissues—not just in lab dishes. The core problem is that scientists know a great deal about stem cells in culture but very little about how they respond to injury, scarring, or disease inside the body. Without that knowledge, it is impossible to design drugs that trigger repair. The Centre tackles this by asking specific questions: how do stem cells react to damage, what controls their proliferation in tissues, can drugs or transplanted cells boost that process, and will the resulting new cells actually integrate and restore function? If the Centre succeeds, it could produce a new class of regenerative therapies for conditions such as multiple sclerosis—where the lack of repair drives the majority of the disease’s €10 billion annual cost in Europe. The Centre also trains the next generation of scientists and runs an outreach programme to counter public misconceptions about stem cells, ensuring that progress in the lab translates into real-world medicine.
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This proposal represents a request for the renewal of the Edinburgh Centre for Regenerative Medicine. Our Centre tackles a major problem in modern medicine - the lack of any therapies that promote repair in the clinic. At present, a trip to the doctor will lead to a drug to limit the damage from getting worse, but nothing to repair the damage already done. This lack of regenerative therapies is a huge societal and medical problem - for example in Multiple Sclerosis it causes the majority of the 10 billion Euro annual cost of the disease. To develop this new class of drugs we need to study stem cells, the immortal cells present in many of our tissues that can generate all the cells required for repair. Despite spectacular advances in our understanding of their properties when growing in dishes in the lab, however, we still know very little about what controls their behaviour in tissues, and particularly in tissues damaged by disease or scarring. It is this problem that represents the starting point of our Centre's quest for new treatments. To tackle this problem we bring together scientists who can address all of the specific questions we need to consider - how do stem cells react to damage, how is their proliferation regulated in tissues, can we increase this proliferation by drugs or by transplanting in new cells and, even if we do, will these new cells be incorporated into and repair the damaged tissue? We also need to partner these scientists with technologists and doctors able to develop our discoveries into products and then try them out in special clinics where very small numbers of highly-selected patients are given these experimental treatments to see if they work. In working on this, we have two other very important goals. First, we need to train the next generation of clinical and non-clinical scientists in this field so as to ensure that the investment made is sustainable. We select the brightest and the best each year for our PhD programme and provide them with a state-of-the-art training in all areas of stem cells and regenerative medicine, and then help them start their own independent careers. Second, we need to tell the public and politicians what it is we do and why it is important. For this, we have a an Outreach programme (the best in Europe) that provides accurate information on all aspects of stem cells via the press, the web and in person - a vital role to ensure that misconceptions about stem cells are not allowed to spoil the promise of this most exciting area of science.
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