The King’s Together Strategic Award is essential to set up the platform. After this initial year, we aim to open the platform to other King’s researchers. I believe that this platform is going to support the development of various exciting projects generating new interdisciplinary collaborations across King’s and it will place King’s at the forefront of intestinal organoid research.
Dr Joana F Neves, School of Immunology & Microbial Sciences
04 September 2019
Team awarded King's Together funding to set up platform to study complex disease
An interdisciplinary group of researchers has received a King's Together Strategic Award for a year to establish a platform to facilitate inter- and multidisciplinary disease studies.
The group of researchers aim to create a platform to generate mini-guts grown from stem cells to study complex diseases such as inflammatory bowel disease, allergies and cancer.
The platform builds on previous work from the Neves lab, School of Immunology & Microbial Sciences, on the use of human intestinal organoids otherwise known as mini-guts to understand how cells interact in the gut in health and diseases. The Neves lab is using this complex system to study interactions between immune cells, intestinal epithelial cells and gut bacteria.
During the first year, the platform will be housed in the Stem Cell Hotel in the Centre for Stem Cells & Regenerative Medicine on the 28th floor of Guy’s Hospital.
The interdisciplinary team is led by Dr Joana F Neves, Faculty of Life Sciences & Medicine and includes members from the Faculty of Dentistry, Oral & Craniofacial Sciences and Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology & Neuroscience.
The King’s Together Strategic Awards are designed to support longer-term strategic research projects with a health theme.
The team of researchers includes:
Principal Investigators:
Eileen Gentleman, Centre for Craniofacial & Regenerative Biology
Natalie J Prescott, Department of Medical & Molecular Genetics
Subhankar Mukhopadhyay, Peter Gorer Department of Immunobiology
Davide Danovi, Center for Stem Cells & Regenerative Medicine
Alexandra Santos, Peter Gorer Department of Immunobiology and Department of Women & Children’s Health
Franziska Denk, Wolfson Centre for Age-Related Disease
Driton Vllasaliu, Institute of Pharmaceutical Sciences
Co-Investigators:
Mauricio da Silva Morais, School of Biomedical Engineering and Imaging Science
Mike Curtis, Faculty of Dentistry, Oral & Craniofacial Sciences
Tony Ng, Comprehensive Cancer Centre
Peter M Irving, Guy’s and St Thomas’ NHS Foundation Trust,
Alessandra Vigilante, Center for Stem Cells & Regenerative Medicine
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Senior Lecturer in Mucosal Immunology and Group Leader