Warwick Medical School has been ranked 10th out of all UK medical schools for incorporating planetary health into medical education.

Warwick Medical School has been awarded £440,000 by the National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR) for a major new study exploring how job quality affects workers' health.

Cells contain a myriad of vesicle types with distinct behaviours and functions. Intracellular nanovesicles (INVs), collectively marked by the membrane protein TPD54, are a recently described family of small, uncoated vesicles that move mainly via diffusion. Many subtypes or ‘flavours’ of INVs appear to exist and participate in various trafficking processes. In this study (Fesenko et al., 2025), the Royle lab report the first INV proteome and explore whether ATG9A vesicles, small vesicles involved in autophagosome biogenesis, are in fact a flavour of INV. The INV proteome shows overlap with proteomes from synaptic vesicles, synaptic-like microvesicles (SLMVs) and ATG9A vesicles, which are particularly enriched for TPD54. To determine whether TPD54-containing vesicles also contain ATG9A and vice versa, the authors ‘trap’ each vesicle type by relocalising them to mitochondria and observe how the other vesicle marker responds. Trapping of TPD54 also relocalises the bulk of ATG9A vesicles, whereas trapping of ATG9A only affects a fraction of TPD54 vesicles, suggesting that ATG9A vesicles are a specific subset of INV. Moreover, trapping of INVs relocalises several proteins established to be ATG9A vesicle cargoes. ATG9A vesicles are thought to function as ‘seeds’ for growing phagophores, and the authors indeed observe that TPD54 depletion dampens autophagy in starved cells. Together, these data indicate that ATG9A vesicles represent a new INV flavour and implicate INVs in autophagic regulation.

Read the paper here.

Read the interview with first author Mary Fesenko.

In this Open Biology paper from the Dean lab, Athina Paterou and her co-authors present a set of >100 plasmids that allows endogenous gene tagging using a diverse set of protein tags and drug resistances. This facilitates extensive protein-protein interaction studies, biochemistry, and microscopy techniques understand protein function. They perform extensive validation of these tags, identifying the best (brightest, most stable) fluorescent protein for different applications, and highlighting the effect of tandem epitope tags on protein localisation and function in expansion microscopy appraches. To meet the needs to the parasitological community, they show the plasmid series works in related parasites, such as Leishmania mexicana, and create a plasmid for tagging GPI-anchored proteins.
Read the paper here.Link opens in a new window

There is an urgent need for novel classes of antibiotics to combat the ever-increasing threat of Anti-Microbial Resistance (AMR). This work builds upon prior research conducted in collaboration between Professors Scott (Chemistry department) and Waterfield (WMS). Prof Scott’s lab has, and continues to produce, a very large and diverse library of synthetic metallohelix compounds, some of which are very potent against pathogenic bacteria. Importantly slight changes in the chemistry of the compounds allows us to “tune” their target specificity, for example, against Gram-positive bacteria (e.g. Staph aureus) or Gram-negative bacteria (e.g. E. coli). Two enantiomeric pairs of iron(ii) metallohelices, of different types can be created as water-soluble, stable, and optically pure bimetallic complexes, differing principally in the length of the central hydrophobic region between two cationic domains.

In a new study, led by James Shelford (Royle lab) and Selena Burgess (Bayliss lab, Leeds), we report a structural model for the interaction between ch-TOG and TACC3. These two proteins have a conserved interaction and are linked to cancer due to their overexpression in a range of solid tumours. Using this knowledge, we uncovered Affimers that can inhibit the interaction. Expressing the Affimers in cells led to the fragmentation of the pericentriolar material (see image), uncovering a new role for these proteins during mitosis.
The work was funded by a Cancer Research UK Programme Award to Royle and Bayliss labs, and was a collaboration involving the labs of Pfuhl (KCL), Tomlinson (Leeds) and Calabrese (Leeds).
Read the paper here.Link opens in a new window

Warwick Medical School is proud to be part of the new NIHR INSIGHT programme: ‘Inspiring Students into Research’, working with other higher education institutions, the NHS, and local authority partners in the West Midlands. This £4.6M investment from NIHR provides an opportunity for newly qualified and early career health and care professionals (excluding medical and dentist professionals) to undertake research training leading to a Master's qualification.

Eleanor Hoverd (NIHR ICA Clinical Doctoral Research Fellow, Warwick Applied Health) has co-produced a short film as part of her PhD study: Developing an inclusive health and care research system: a realist evaluation of participation in health and care research with people from Black African Diaspora Communities, in the UK.

Congratulations to Professor Lisa Dikomitis, incoming Director of Warwick Applied Health at Warwick Medical School, for receiving a highly prestigious NIHR Senior Investigator Award.

A groundbreaking new project, GroW, aims to empower women with chronic health conditions by providing a personalised and adaptive digital health tool to support long-term health management. The project, spearheaded by DDM Health, in collaboration with Warwick Medical School, University of Warwick and Walsall Housing Group (whg) has been selected for funding through the SBRI Healthcare Women's Health competition.

Warwick Medical School is part of one of five new Incubators announced by the NIHR to support research careers. The NIHR Knowledge Mobilisation Incubator will develop a national learning network of experts in knowledge mobilisation and practice.

This work was conducted by Sedigheh (Mobi) Ghanbarzadeh and Darius Koester in close collaboration with collaboration with theorists Sami Al-Izzi and Richard Morris from the School of Physics, UNSW Sydney (both alumni of Warwick) and discusses how different levels of ATP (our loved fuel for molecular motors and other cellular processes) can lead to different dynamics and patterns of force generation by membrane tethered actomyosin networks. Inspired by experimental observations, we developed a new way of using a hydrodynamics approach to describe a hierarchical system of membrane tethered actin networks with a layer of force generating myosin motors atop that interact with each other while taking into account how myosin motor activity and affinity to actin depends on ATP concentrations. Read the paper here.Link opens in a new window

TRAC-VT (isrctn.com identifier: ISRCTN84509594) was a prospective, multicentre, observational single-arm study enrolling patients at five hospitals in five European countries. The study evaluated the safety and efficacy of the DiamondTemp RF ablation system modulating power (based on real-time tissue temperature) in patients with sustained monomorphic VT and ICM/NICM. Headline results: Acute procedural success was 100% (95% CI, 91–100%). No primary safety endpoints were observed. Six-month follow-up was completed in 92% of patients with 81% (95% CI, 65–91%) freedom from sustained or treated VT.

Read the paper here.Link opens in a new window

The 2025 Warwick Medical School Prizegiving Evening took place on Wednesday 12 February, celebrating the fantastic work and achievements of our undergraduate and MB ChB students over the last year and recognising teaching and personal tutoring excellence amongst our staff.

To mark Valentines Day we spoke to two alumni who met 20 years ago at Warwick and completed their medical degrees together at WMS before getting married, having children and progressing with their medical careers.

The Mammo-50 trial, the first major study to investigate the safest, most effective monitoring of women after surgery, has been published in The Lancet.

The EDITH trial (‘Early Detection using Information Technology in Health’) is backed by £11 million of government support via the National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR). It is the latest example of how British scientists are transforming cancer care, building on the promising potential of cutting-edge innovations to tackle one of the UK’s biggest killers. Read the full news item here.

We're delighted to announce that Professor Lisa Dikomitis will be joining us as Director of Warwick Applied Health from 1 May 2025. Currently based at Kent and Medway Medical School, Prof Dikomitis is an anthropologist whose research encompasses global health, migration and refugee studies, health services research and medical education.

Doctors could soon be able to predict your individual chances of getting cancer and offer personalised detection and prevention, thanks to a new research project involving Warwick Medical School.

To improve access to advanced optical microscopy in educational and resource-limited settings, researchers in Warwick’s Centre for Mechanochemical Cell BiologyLink opens in a new window have developed the eduWOSM (educational Warwick Open Source Microscope), an open hardware platform for transmitted-light and epifluorescence imaging in up to 4 colours, including single molecule imaging. Read the paper hereLink opens in a new window.

YouTube channelLink opens in a new window - Video explaining what the eduWOSM is, what it can do, and how to use it.

A groundbreaking study sheds light on the collaboration between dynein and KIF1C, two essential motor proteins responsible for transporting cellular cargo in opposite directions. Dynein, which moves towards the cell body, is linked to conditions like Charcot-Marie-Tooth disease type 2 and Spinal Muscular Atrophy, while KIF1C, which carries cargo towards the cell periphery, is associated with hereditary spastic paraplegia and spastic ataxia.

World-leading research from Warwick Medical School (WMS) has been recognised in this year’s New Year Honours List.

Professor Gavin Perkins, Dean of Medicine at Warwick Medical School since August 2023, has been awarded an MBE for services to Resuscitation Science. There is also an MBE for Professor of Obstetrics Siobhan Quenby for services to obstetrics research.

A leading UK study aiming to improve outcomes for patients with potentially life-threatening abnormal heart rhythms (arrhythmias) has successfully completed recruitment at University Hospitals Coventry and Warwickshire (UHCW) NHS Trust.

For the last few months Warwick Medical School students have been offering health checks to staff, students and members of the community from their base at the University of Warwick Sports Centre. This includes height, weight, blood sugar and blood pressure checks. 200 service users have passed through the doors of 11 clinics.