Current Portfolio
- Epilepsy
- Bone disease
- Nanotoxicity testing
- Abdominal pain studies
- Brain cell imaging
- Huntington's disease
- Breast Cancer
- Viral encephalitis
- Chronic pain in arthritis and fibromyalgia
- Bacterial infection in cystic fibrosis
- Advances in human neuroscience
- Neurofibromatosis
- Hypersecretion of mucus in asthma
- Premature birth
- A clearer picture of pain relief
- Tissue engineering of human liver
- Creating knockout tissues
- Skin cancer
- Magnetoencephalography (MEG)
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Nanotoxicity testing
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2010 – 2012 Research Assistant Fellowship Polarised monolayer cell models to determine permeability to macromolecules and nanoparticles for drug delivery and nanotoxicologyDr M. Garnett, Dr S. Stolnik-Trenkic & Dr F. Falcone |
Nanoparticles are usually absorbed through the lung or gut, and research work in this area is carried out using a wide variety of animal studies. Animals such as the mini-pig, sheep, rabbits, mice, rats and fish are all used to study how nanoparticles are absorbed and transported throughout the body.
These animal experiments involve applying samples of drugs or chemicals outside the body and measuring absorption rates, or by injecting substances parenterally (not through the digestive tract) and looking at their bio-distribution into different tissues over time. Many studies use mini-pigs to evaluate differences between various sunscreen formulations.
Although there is an increasing interest in nanomaterials and their potential in every field of science, there is also a growing concern about their uptake into the body and their potential toxicity. There is also interest in the pharmaceutical industry about how to administer certain types of drugs without using injections.
Drug delivery using nanoparticles and nanotoxicology both require information on how nanoparticles can enter the body and be distributed around the body across the epithelial and endothelial barriers. In vitro approaches to this field are highly desirable, but current models are not representative of in vivo barriers. At present, relevant and accurate information on transport of nanoparticles and macromolecules is only carried out using animals.
In this project, the Research Group proposes to investigate the capture of a basement lamina material on an appropriate support and grow cell monolayers on the lamina to give very similar conditions to those existing in vivo. The production of basement lamina in vitro has already been established, but details of how the lamina can be captured, supported and used are not currently known.
Currently, samples can be applied onto tissue cultures consisting of a monolayer of cells grown on a synthetic membrane supported in growth medium so that transport through the cell layer can be measured. However, the synthetic membranes do not have the same permeabilities as human tissues, and are suboptimal for cell growth.
In vivo, all endothelial and epithelial cells grow on a basement lamina which gives the correct environment including molecular signals for cell attachment and also contributes to the permeability of the tissue.
The Research Group will provide novel supports based on electrospun polymer fibres to solve this problem, and will then investigate the transport and transport mechanisms of a variety of materials across the new realistic polarised monolayers. Finally, they will look at using cell co-cultures to provide more complex and more relevant cell models, which may be useful in a variety of different tissue models and applications.