June 5th, 2013

Welcome to the Fifth issue of the iBio Research Group News page. A new issue will appear on this website roughly quarterly in September, January, March and June. Contributions for the page should be sent to G.Stafford at any time for inclusion in the next issue.

Click to skip to Grant and Staff News or Student and Post-doc news

iBio@Discovery night

As part of the University involvement in Science Week 2013, the iBio group turned up in force to let the people of Sheffield know all about the science we do in the school. 

Lynne Bingle, Simon Whawell and Abby invited members of the public to find out what was in their saliva to view under a microscope, getting folk up close and personal with their own cells while Keith Hunter and Craig Murdoch showed off some sections.  The microbiology group (Graham Stafford, Matt Hicks, Prachi Stafford, Rebecca Lowry, Andy Frey, Charlotte Green and Kate Naylor) with help from some cuddly bugs explained about the different bacteria that can be found in your body and also wowed people with a lego flagellum! Children visiting the stand were asked to design their own bugs, the resulting designs were weird and wonderful. The winning bugs can be found here.  In addition one of the winners came to the school to collect her prize and was given a tour of the facilities by Graham.

Graham Stafford also gave a talk as part of the evening, called 'the animalcules within: mini-creatures in your mouth'. This interactive talk showed what can be found in our mouths, what the little friends (and enemies) look like, how they move around, how bacteria catch colds and what happens if we do not brush our teeth!

Fiona Boissonade, Emma Bird, Adam and Sarah gave an interesting insight into the work of the neuroscience researchers. They helped the children to make their own model of a neurone. Fiona had crafted a nerve scale which involved a piece of string around 15m long! They also used pin-prick pain sensation, two point discrimination tests and taste stimulation to show the role the nerves. find out more here

Journal Club

This continues this term under the organisation of Helen and Claire.  Many thanks to all who have participated this last term.  It would be nice to see a few more faces there, particularly in order to reflect the diversity of the group.

CAKE

The Friday 3pm Cake Club continues this term with highlights including some fantastic homemade nutty brownies and shortbread amoung my personal favourites. 

In terms of artistry the prize goes to this effort from Patisserie Valerie!!.

Teaching Stannington about bacteria

On April 24th this year several members of the microbiology team: Dr Graham Stafford, Kate Naylor, Charlotte Green and Andy Frey visited Stannington Infant School for a series of sessions for the children teaching them about the wonderful world of bacteria.  We had interesting discussions on germs, some fun drawing bugs and some microscopes set up- with Andy's tongue matter!

Join the DOV study

The Diet and Oral Viruses (DOV) study started recruitment at the end of April and we would like to invite others to take part in the study. The study is investigating if there is a link between diet and the HPV virus which causes some head and neck cancers.
We are looking for people aged between 18-60 years old who have not received the HPV vaccination and who have never been diagnosed with oral cancer or dysplasia to take part. To take part in the study you should also have a Sheffield Teaching Hospitals patient number (which you will have if you have ever had an appointment at any of the Sheffield hospitals including: CCDH, Jessops, Hallamshire and Northern General). For more information about the study or to book an appointment please see https://sites.google.com/a/sheffield.ac.uk/dov/ email: dov@sheffield.ac.uk or phone 07500 050 931. Everyone who takes part receives a £20 Love2Shop voucher.

It's OK to ask about clinical research

Vanessa Hearnden, Kathryn Hurrell-Gillingham and Katy D'Apice took the opportunity to promote the clinical research currently taking place in the Charles Clifford Dental Hospital in conjunction with the School of Clinical Dentistry. There is an impressive amount currently going on demonstrated by the fact South Yorkshire Oral and Dental was ranked by NIHR as the best Oral and Dental speciality group for clinical trial recruitment in 2011-2012. Patients visiting CCDH were invited to ask questions about the research taking place, find out about trials which they could take part in and understand why we do clinical research. 

R and I Grant for Helen Colley and Simon Whawell

Helen Colley was awarded a Faculty of Medicine Dentistry & Health Innovation Fund (FIF) grant £7,450 in collaboration with Dr. Mark Thompson (Department of Chemistry). The money is to fund preliminary work to support an application to Wellcome Trust Seeding Drug Discovery in collaboration with Argenta on a project to develop a series of potent new microtubule-targeting agents.

Faculty of Medicine Dentistry & Health Innovation Fund

Further funding from this pot was also acquired by Simon Whawell in a joint project with Kirkstall ltd as an industrial partner.  Title: Investigating epithelial-fibroblast interactions using the Quasi-vivo® cell culture system
Whawell SA (PI), Lambert DW, Lewis M (Kirkstall Limited) £8,776

Living Below the Line

Vanessa Hearnden, Jill Callaghan, Rob Bolt and Helen Colley took part in the sponsored "Live Below the Line" challenge. We each had just £1 per day to spend on all of our food and drink for 5 days. It was a tough challenge which aimed to raise awareness of the challenges faced by those living below the poverty line both at home and abroad. We raised over £600 for Restless Development, learnt that 39p pasta sauce is revolting and that tea made from a broken tea bag gave just enough caffeine to function (but not very well!). To read more about what we ate, see photographic evidence of some of our meals and to sponsor us please see https://www.livebelowtheline.com/me/hungryness

EUREKA

Simon Whawell's continuing work with the Eureka project featured on the University staff webpage  where he is pictured with London 2012 para-olympic gold medalist Hannah Cockroft at Eureka! in Halifax:

http://www.sheffield.ac.uk/staff/news/2013/dentalexpert

Genevieve in Braziiiiiil

One of our PhD students, Genevieve, is currently visiting Dr Ricardo Coletta’s laboratory in Piracicaba, Brazil, carrying out research into tumour-stromal interactions. This is part of an on-going collaboration between Dr Coletta and his team and Dan Lambert’s group.

Congratulations Arpita et al.,

Genevieve was also an author on the following paper: Cigarette smoke condensate promotes pro-tumourigenic stromal-epithelial interactions by suppressing miR-145.

Pal A, Melling G, Hinsley EE, Kabir TD, Colley HE, Murdoch C, Lambert DW. J Oral Pathol Med. 2013 Apr;42(4):309-14; the first author of this work, Arpita Pal, a former Molecular Medicine MSc student with Dan, recently gained a place to study for a PhD at Purdue University, USA. Congratulations Arpita.

GSK symposium Poster prize for Andy Frey

Congratulations to Andrew Frey, whose poster on the potential of sialidase inhibitors in relation to periodontal pathogen-host interactions was so well received at the 1st year poster session that he won himself a prize of £100 in Amazon vouchers that he assures me he will not spend on wine/ women or song!  Well done Andy.

Congratulations on a nice paper

Congratulations also to Prachi Stafford, who was first author on another paper from the group: Stafford P, Higham J, Murdoch C, Douglas CWID, Stafford GP & Lambert DW (2013). Porphyromonas gingivalis degrades mTOR following bacterial challenge of oral epithelial cells. Mol. Oral. Micro (in press).

Welcome New PhD students

Emmanuel Amabebe joined in April 2013, in a joint project between the school and Prof Dilly Anumba in the Jessops hospital entitled: Characterisation of the vaginal microbiota and metabolic fingerprint of women at risk of pre-term birth.  Find out more about Emmanuel here.

We also welcome back Fatma Alsohabi, a former MMedSci in Oral Pathology student (2011-12) who is supervised by Keith Hunter and will be working on The role of Fanconi genes in HNSCC, co-supervised by Spencer Collis in Oncology.

Welcome masters students

Arati Nepal- is working with Dr Graham Stafford on a project searching for novel antimicrobials from bacteriophage.

Luke Jennings- working with Dr Helen Colley on ‘Developing tissue engineered models to investigate the role of tumour-associated macrophages in oral cancer progression’ with Craig as co-supervisor.

Egle Butyvaide- is working with Drs Stafford and Lambert on examination of the glycoproteome in response to periodontal pathogens

Muna Ghazzawi- is working with Dr Dan Lambert on the endethelin system in oral cancer

Prem Yugandhar - is working with Dr Dan Lambert and Prof Fiona Boissanade on Neuropeptides in cancer metastasis

Muhammed Yakin

Please find attached a photo of Muhhamed Yakin an alumuni of our Masters in Diagnostic Oral Pathology who recently won a Divisional Award at the IADR in Seattle.
His work was entitled 'Biomarkers that predict recurrence in odontogenic keratocysts' co-authored with Paul Speight, Keith Hunter and Adam Jones.