I am a PhD student at the University of Edinburgh, where my research focuses on an important challenge in pancreatic islet transplantation: how can we protect islets from the inflammatory stress and ischaemic injury they experience during isolation, culture and transplantation? I am working with Mr Sutherland and Prof Mole on approaches to improve islet survival and engraftment. In Edinburgh I focus on treating islets with small molecule inhibitors to mitigate inflammation and hypoxic stress during the peri-transplant period. Furthermore, we are testing whole-pancreas perfusion as a strategy to protect the pancreas before islet isolation, with the aim of improving islet yield at the time of isolation and survival following intraportal transplant.
Outside the laboratory, I volunteer with Diabetes UK to raise awareness of T1D and help challenge misconceptions surrounding the condition. Being a researcher living with T1D since childhood, I believe it’s important to communicate about the disease and ongoing research aimed at developing better treatments to ultimately find a cure.
In the third year of my PhD, I was grateful to have been awarded the British Transplant Society (BTS) Andrew Paris Memorial Fellowship, which enabled me to work for 6 months at VIC at Harvard medical school under the supervision of Dr Poznansky. During the fellowship, I had the opportunity to explore islet preservation from a different angle, shifting my focus from the transplantation-related injury I study in Edinburgh to protecting beta cells from the immune-mediated destruction that underlies T1D.
During my time at VIC, I worked with Dr Dogan on the immunomodulation of islets to immune protect the beta cell mass at the onset of T1D. One of our projects involved a nanobubble-based, ultrasound-mediated gene delivery platform, a non-viral approach that uses ultrasound-responsive nanobubbles to deliver immunomodulatory genes to beta cells. The aim is to protect the islets against autoimmune attack and delay disease progression. We also investigated an AAV-based approach targeting the development of the insulin protein in beta cells. Alongside these gene-delivery and immunomodulation projects, I contributed to a longitudinal study of T1D progression in the non-obese diabetic (NOD) mouse model, which showed us how the immune cell populations change over the course of disease onset and progression.
A few months after completing my fellowship, I returned to Boston for the ASGCT Annual Meeting, where Dr Dogan Laura Chen and I presented the latest research on non-viral gene delivery platforms targeting pancreatic islets aimed at restoring and immunoprotecting residual beta-cell mass in T1D. Our nanobubble-based, ultrasound-mediated gene delivery strategy was recognized with an Abstract Award. We look forward to continuing to advance these emerging non-viral approaches for tissue- and cell-specific gene delivery.
The fellowship has been much more than an opportunity to learn new techniques. Working across transplantation biology, immunomodulation and gene delivery has broadened my perspective as a diabetes and islet biologist, allowing me to think about beta-cell preservation across different contexts of T1D.
I am extremely grateful to the British Transplantation Society for supporting the fellowship, to my supervisors in Edinburgh, Mr Sutherland and Prof Mole, for their continued support, and to Dr Poznansky, Dr Dogan and the entire VIC team for welcoming me to the lab and for their mentorship and guidance during my time in Boston. I look forward to carrying the skills and perspectives gained at VIC into the remainder of my PhD, while continuing the collaborations and connections built during my time there. I hope there will be more opportunities to work together and to return to VIC in the future.
