Institute of Clinical Sciences update

Jean Baptiste VannierERC Starting Grant awarded to Jean-Baptiste Vannier– Jean-Baptiste Vannier was awarded a prestigious European Research Council (ERC) Starting Grant of €1.5 million for five years. He was selected from 3,273 applicants (9 % success rate). ERC Starting Grants support up-and-coming scientists who are about to establish a new research team and start conducting independent research. Jean-Baptiste, who joined the CSC in the autumn from CRUK, will investigate the role of telomeres in DNA replication. When telomeres fail to fold into these structures, the genome becomes unstable, which is a hallmark of every cancer.

vahid_samSynergy: Leverhulme Trust Research Project Grant awarded to CSC and Imperial College Researchers – Vahid Shahrezaei from the Mathematics department at Imperial College and Sam Marguerat from the CSC’s Quantitative Gene Expression Group will be leading the £250,173 award to investigate noise in gene expression using single cells. The collaboration will unite Marguerat’s experimental skills with Shahrezaei’s theoretical knowledge in order to gain insight into the process of stochastic gene expression and protein noise, which describes the fluctuating number of molecules inside cells that causes seemingly identical cells to behave differently.

Link between COX-2 inhibitors and cardiovascular risk explained– Research news article on why COX-2 inhibitors, a class of widely prescribed anti-inflammatories, may lead to increased risk of heart attacks and strokes (published in Circulation by James Leiper/Jane Mitchell, Imperial/NHLI; reference: Blerina Ahmetaj-Shala, Nicholas S. Kirkby et al. ‘Evidence That Links Loss Of Cyclo-oxygenase-1 2 With Increased Asymmetric Dimethylarginine: Novel Explanation of Cardiovascular Side Effects Associated With Anti-inflammatory Drugs.’ Circulation, 9 December 2014. doi: 10.1161/CIRCULATIONAHA.114.011591).

Almut Caspary
Institute of Clinical Science
Faculty of Medicine

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