Professor Jon Frampton discusses his work into the Stem Cells and Ageing initiative within the College of Medical and dental Sciences at The University of Birmingham.
Duration: 02.51 mins
Speaker
S1 - Professor John Frampton, Professor of Stem Cell Biology
S2 -Dr Philip Newsome, Senior Lecturer in Hepatology/Consultant Hepatologist
S3 - Andrew King, Research Fellow, School of Immunity and Infection
Transcript
S1 Well I’m a cell and molecular biologist and my particular interest is the mechanisms that make sure that those stem cells do their job properly so that they sit there in a relatively quiescent state we would call it and yet when called upon, on a continuous basis or in particular in response to some sort of damage, a trauma, then they’re able to respond in exactly the right way to the right degree. Those stem cells, most of the time in most of us work perfectly normally, continuing to work for 80 or 90 years or more. But their ability to do that does decline with age. So what is it that goes wrong as we age? Also quite a lot of diseases within the blood system, but also in other tissues, other organs, result from defects in the stem cell population. We have within the Queen Elizabeth the Liver Unit, one of the largest liver units within Europe. They perform a very large number of liver transplantations on a continual basis. They’re limited by the number of liver transplantations that they can do, purely on the basis of the available donors for transplantation and in the environment that we’re in with liver clinicians working side by side with people like myself, to have the ability to develop new cellular approaches, laboratory based cellular approaches where we can potentially from stem cells create replacement liver cells that they could use as an alternative to using the whole organ donor.
S2 My role has been to coordinate the clinical trials of stem cells in patients with liver disease. One of the things I’m involved in is a clinical trial where we’re using stem cells from patients who have liver disease and we’re trying to see if that can help result in repair and recovery from that liver damage.
S3 Our use of stem cells is in patients with extremely advanced liver disease who could become extremely unwell in the future and potentially need liver transplantation. We are hoping to avoid the need for this by treating patients with their own stem cells. Because there are no alternative treatments available for these patients we’ve found that patients are extremely enthusiastic and very keen to take part in the trial.
S2 I’m hoping that stem cells will be demonstrated to improve the function of the liver and reduce the scarring in the liver.
S1 I think the research that we do in the Birmingham University with respect to stem cell science and its application in medicine, creates an exciting environment for students. They can see that we’re doing some of the most cutting edge, modern, fundamental biology that really has the potential for patient benefits..
End of recording