The GibsonGroup and their Industrial partners Iceni Diagnostics have been collaborating on new tools for Lateral Flow Diagnostics(LFDs). In particular, on replacing antibodies as the recognition units with glycans (sugars). Here the team show the first example of a complete LFD which uses glycans as both the mobile and stationary phase, providing complete proof-of-concept that a lateral flow diagnostic can be achieved without antibodies. This is demonstrated for the sensitive detection of lectins and could be applied to a range of biological targets, spanning toxins, viruses and more.

Read the paper here

The GibsonGroup with their industry partner Iceni Diagnostics have demonstrated a new approach to make ’test lines’ in lateral flow diagnostics. Current methods to make a test line involve immobilising antibodies, or using high molecular weight proteins with chemical modifications to display binding ligands. In this work, the team showed that a synthetic polymer can be used instead, which could dramatically simply the process of making a new test line, and using ’small molecule ligands’ as the targets, shown here with a glycan and biotin.

Read the paper here

Julia Walsh has been awarded a PhD in Health Sciences for their PhD on ‘Using spontaneously generated online patient experiences to improve healthcare: A case study using Modafinil’. Julia was supervised by Frances Griffiths in the Division of Health Sciences and Jonathan Cave.

The debilitating arm and shoulder disability and pain that some women who have had breast cancer surgery experience as a side effect of their surgery can be reduced by following a physiotherapy-led exercise programme after their operation, a new study has found.

Future healthcare professionals working in mental health and neurosciences will be trained at a new Doctoral Training Programme (DTP) involving Warwick Medical School thanks to a £7.24million award from Wellcome.

Public access defibrillators are disproportionately lacking in the most deprived areas of England, which are among the communities at the greatest risk of cardiac arrest, according to new analysis led by WMS.

Warwick Medical School has received two commendations at the university’s inaugural Excellence in Equality, Diversity and Inclusion Awards.

The COVID-19 pandemic has brought health inequalities into sharp focus on an international scale. Vulnerability to and mortality from acute COVID-19 infection is higher in men, whereas, Long COVID disproportionately affects women. Why?

Read the paper here

Dr Joanne Muter and Professor Jan Brosens collaborated with researchers in Chicago and Buffalo, USA, in a study that used comparative transcriptomics to reconstruct the evolutionary history of gene expression in the pregnant endometrium. The study identified hundreds of genes that were gained or lost in the womb lining of primate and human lineages. Genes that evolved to be expressed at the maternal-fetal interface in the human lineage were enriched for immune functions and diseases, such as preterm birth and pre-eclampsia. Read the paper here

We're delighted to announce that Dr Rob Howes, the Director of the Rosalind Franklin Laboratory, has been appointed as an honorary Professor at WMS.

We're pleased to report that 150 of our MB ChB students have already received their Covid19 booster this week, in a dedicated vaccination clinic at Gibbet Hill.

Local residents of Coventry and Warwickshire are invited to equip themselves with the skills to save a life thanks to Warwick Medical School students who are holding a public CPR awareness event to mark #RestartAHeart day on Saturday 16 October.

Hilda Kabambe has been awarded a PhD in Health Sciences for their PhD on ‘Female sex workers' experiences with access to health care services in Malawi’. Hilda was supervised by Sophie Staniszewska and Kate Seers in the Division of Health Sciences.

The GibsonGroup, working with UHCW and Iceni Diagnostics have shown that glycans (sugars) can be used in place of antibodies to detect SARS-COV-2. Last year the team identified that SARS-COV-2 spike protein could bind certain glycans, and in this work they incorporate the glycan onto gold nanoparticles to make a ‘flow through’ (similar to lateral flow) device. The methods allowed detection of infection and was shown to retain binding to several variants of concern. The underpinning principle can now be applied to a range of infections or biosensing challenges. The work was large collaboration with Chemistry, WMS (including the Straube-Group from our division), Physics, Industry and the hospital.

Read the paper - Glycan-Based Flow-Through Device for the Detection of SARS-COV-2 

Within species, there can be very large differences in animal size. Perhaps the most striking example is in domestic dogs; e.g. compare a Chihuahua with an English Mastiff. Despite being genetically very similar, their internal organs are correctly positioned and sized for their particularly body size, i.e. the organ size scales with the organism size. How does such scaling occur? There has been extensive analysis of scaling of external organs, such as insect wings, due to their accessibility for imaging. However, how internal organs scale and adjust for changes in system size remains poorly understood. In recent work, the Saunders lab utilised a genetic trick to generate smaller Drosophila embryos that could be live imaged. From live imaging of heart, hindgut and nervous system formation, they have provided the first quantitative dynamic analysis of internal organ scaling during development. Interestingly, the initial heart vessel scales precisely with embryo size (see figure). However, the developing nervous system appears to have a lower bound on its size, regardless of how reduced in size the embryo is. These results suggest that organs adapt to changes in embryo size through different mechanisms. Hopefully further work, including in vertebrate systems, will uncover the genetic and biophysical mechanisms driving internal organ scaling.

Glycans (sugars) dictate a huge range of biological recognition processes, which can be replicated by presenting the sugars onto polymers (or other materials). However, whilst these almost always have high affinity, these materials are non-selective and can bind a wide range of targets, limiting their use. In a Perspective article, Dr Sarah-Jane Richards and Prof. Matthew Gibson discuss synthetic tools to enable selectivity to be engineered into glycomaterials, to help translate them into applications including biosensing.

Read the article now here 

Read more about Liz's experience below:

I was awarded the British Empire Medal for two things, firstly the work I did as Staff Covid Swabbing Hub Lead with the Wolverhampton Quality Team, which is part of Black Country and West Birmingham CCG. This involved being day to day operational lead, and also taking a strategic lead on planning and the development of standard operating procedures and policies for staff swabbing. Secondly it was for leading on a Strategy and Retention Plan for General Practice Nursing across the CCG footprint, which was recognised by NHS England and Improvement.

Both of these projects were 100% team effort and couldn't have been achieved without the support of my clinical and non-clinical colleagues (from the CCG, general practice, acute trust and local authority) who worked on everything from policy development and co-design, to swabbing, security and marshaling, to booking patients in, chasing and recording results, to training, organising estate and the supply of equipment and PPE. I'm proud to share the award with them.

We unfortunately didn't win the HSJ Patient Safety Team of the year award but were shortlisted for the work we did around staff and care home swabbing, improving infection prevention procedures with the aim of reducing harm and safeguarding patients.

The Universities of Warwick, Birmingham and Keele have formed a consortium to become part of an NIHR-funded body working to improve public health through research.

Warwick Medical School students have been selected to join the Healthcare Leadership Academy (HLA) Scholars programme - a prestigious scholarship set up to develop and nurture healthcare leaders of the future.

A new drug to lower cholesterol which was appraised by Warwick Evidence will be made available to hundreds of thousands of NHS patients.

Our understanding of the etiology and pathophysiology of endometriosis remains limited. Disease modelling in the field is problematic as many versions of induced mouse models of endometriosis exist. We integrated bioluminescent imaging of ‘lesions’ generated using luciferase-expressing donor mice. We compared longitudinal bioluminescence and histology of lesions, sensory behavior of mice with induced endometriosis and the impact of the GnRH antagonist Cetrorelix on lesion regression and sensory behavior. Four models of endometriosis were tested. We found that the nature of the donor uterine material was a key determinant of how chronic the lesions were as well as their cellular composition. The severity of pain-like behavior also varied across models. Whilst Cetrorelix significantly reduced lesion bioluminescence in all models, it had varying impacts on pain-like behavior. Collectively, our results demonstrate key differences in the progression of the ‘disease’ across different mouse models of endometriosis. We propose that validation and testing in multiple models, each of which may be representative of the different subtypes / heterogeneity observed in women should become a standard approach to discovery science in the field of endometriosis. Read the paper here

With the support of the Wellcome-Translational Partnership, the teams of Dr Meera Unnikrishnan and Professor Sebastien Perrier have developed a new family of nanoparticles for the treatment of TB infection which address the main shortfall of current therapies, poor penetration to mycobacterium containing niches such as macrophages.

The team has designed mannose-decorated nanoparticles loaded with a well-established TB drug, which can degrade and deliver their payload at lysosomal pH. Fluorescence uptake studies showed preferential endocytosis of mannosylated particles via sugar-lectin interactions, and the particles were also shown to be effective at killing intracellular M. bovis BCG bacteria in THP-1 macrophages. Taken together these results show that in vitro, such macrophage-targeted particles increase intracellular isoniazid concentration, showing an increased antimicrobial activity against intracellular mycobacteria. Read the paper here

A protein that causes a cell’s skeleton to bend, allowing it to twist the cell into different shapes, could be key to how cells divide according to WMS scientists.

The Respiratory Strategies in COVID-19; CPAP, High-flow, and Standard Care (RECOVERY-RS) trial has demonstrated that treating hospitalised COVID-19 patients who have acute respiratory failure with continuous positive airway pressure (CPAP) reduces the need for invasive mechanical ventilation.