Our recent paper in Chemical Communications has been highlighted by the Royal Society of Chemistry's magazine 'Chemistry World'. The article reviews are recent findings on how slowing the rate of ice growth during thawing of frozen cells, can improve their viability. In particular, we exemplify this for red blood cells, which are currently only frozen using large amounts of the organic solvent glycerol.

Read the Chemistry World article here

Read the Chem Commun Article here

Read our related work here

http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/acsbiomaterials.5b00162

http://www.nature.com/ncomms/2014/140203/ncomms4244/full/ncomms4244.html

We have been awarded a research grant, joint with the group of Nick Waterfield (Warwick Medical School), from the Leverhulme Trust. The project involves using a combination of chemistry and molecular biology (a.k.a. synthetic biology) to understand the function and potential uses of naturally occuring molecular syringes. There will be a PDRA (Med School) and PhD (Chemistry) working on this project

Our latest paper exploring the use of synthetic polymers for blood cryopreservation has been published. We have preivoulsy shown that ice recrystalisation inhibiting (IRI) polymers can improve cryopreservation, based on the PVA scaffold. Here we rationally designed a new polymer, based on an amopholyte structure - alternating cationinc/anionic charges. This was enabled by using the commodity polymer Gantraz, which gave us previce control over the charge balance. The new polymer was easy to make, and found to inhibit ice growth. It also was non-heamolytic to red blood cells and was used to enhance HES-mediated cryopreservation.

Read the paper here

http://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlelanding/2014/cc/c5cc04647e#!divAbstract

At the 13th PAT (Polymers for Advanced Technology) conference, in HongZhou (China) Matt was awarded the Young Talent award for outstanding research for an academic < 40 years old. He was selected from a shortlist of 5, including academics from USA, Europe and China.

Matt also delivered an invited lecture at the meeting.

Tom Congdon, co-supervised by Dr R. Notman has become the 4th member of the group to pass his PhD viva. His Thesis focussed on the synthesis and application of polymeric ice recrystalisation inhibitors; inspired by how antifreeze glycoproteins function. Tom also made signficant contributions to the design of new thermoresponsive polymers based upon intrinsically biocompatible scaffolds - namely carbohydrates and poly(vinyl alcohol)

Read some of this papers here;

Congdon, T., Shaw P., Gibson, 2015, Polymer Chemistry, 'Thermoresponsive, Well-defined, poly(vinyl alcohol) co- polymers' Accepted Link

Congdon, TR, Wilmet, C., Williams, R., Polt, J., Lilliman, M., and Gibson, M.I., Eur. Polym. J., 2015, 62, 352 - 362, "Functionalised Carbohydrate-Centred Oligomers and Polymers. Thermoresponsivity, Lectin Binding and Degradability"

Congdon, TC, Notman, R., Gibson, MI, Biomacromolecules, 2013, 14, 1578 - 1586 "Antifreeze (Glyco)Protein Mimetic Behaviour of Poly(vinyl alcohol): Detailed Structure-Ice Recrystallisation Inhibition Activity Study" link

Deller, R.C., Congdon, T., Sahid, M., Morgan, M., Vatish, M., Mitchell, D.A., Notman, R., Gibson, M.I., Biomater. Sci., 2013, 1, 478 - 485 "Ice recrystallisation inhibition by polyols: comparison of molecular and macromolecular inhibitors and role of hydrophobic units" Link

Our latest paper has been accepted in RSC Advances. This paper describes our attempts to specfically identifiy lectins associated with bacterial infection and virulence. Lectins are proteins which bind glycans, but are famously promiscuous - any lectin can bind a range of sugars, and vice versa, making sensing them challenging. Current methods rely on protemics (e.g. expensive mass spec) or antibody based strategies - neitehr of these are useful for point of care diagnostics. Here we take an approach inspired by Tongues - these only have 5 different inputs, but can discriminate between a range of tastes by a combination of multiplexing (measuring relative response of each input) and training. Using just 3 simple monosaccharide surfaces we could profile and identify between 5 lectins which all 'bind' galactose. This includes the cholera toxin and a surrogate for ricin - a potential biological warefare agent.

Read the paper here:

http://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlelanding/2014/ra/c5ra08857g#!divAbstract

Discrimination between Lectins with Similar Specificities by Ratiometric Profiling of Binding to Glycosylated Surfaces; A Chemical ‘Tongue’ Approach

As part of his appearance at the Cheltenham festival of Science, Matt was interviewed by BBC radio Gloucester. Tune in later this week to hear the interview. (including the important of a Gin and Tonic to understand the challenges of cryopreserving human tissue..)

Our latest paper has been published in the RSC Journal Polymer Chemistry. 'Thermoresponsive, well-defined, poly(vinyl alcohol) co-polymers'

This papers builds on our previous work in the design and application of biologically-responsive polymers. Most responsive polymers are based on polymers which are assumed to be biocompatiable, but are not used clinically. PVA (poly(vinylalcohol)) however, is widely used in healthcare settings such as eye drops, or pharmaceutical coatings. Therefore, we set out to modify this to make it environmentally responsive (in this case temperatur). Using RAFT polymerization, we made a library of well-defined PVA's and then modifed them with ester side chains, enabling us to precisely control the transition temperature. We think that by basing this on such a well-known and biocompatible polymer we might be able to aid translation of responsive polymers

Read the paper here;

http://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlelanding/2015/py/c5py00775e#!divAbstract