Barts & The London Academic Medicine Conference: Translational Medicine

04/10/2013

BLAMSS2013 is tomorrow! See you all at St Bartholomew's Hospital, London!

16/09/2013

Abstract submission have now closed and we have received an astounding number of abstract submissions. THANK YOU to those who have submitted abstracts; notifications for oral and poster presentations have already been sent out.

To those of you who are interested to attend BLAMSS 2013 as a non-presenting participant, please could you register on our website (www.blamss2013.org)? Registration for this conference remains OPEN until 22 September (THIS SUNDAY!!!), and is FREE (with a refundable £10 deposit). A certificate of participation will be issued to all conference attendees.

BLAMSS 2013 National Research Conferece: Translational Medicine This is a website for National Research Conference 2013 organised by Barts and The London Academic Medicine and Surgery Society! The theme of this inaugural conference is Translational Medicine!

31/08/2013

Abstract submission closes TODAY at 11:59 pm BST. Get your abstract in stat! ;-)

http://www.blamss2013.org/abstract-submission

BLAMSS 2013 National Research Conferece: Translational Medicine This is a website for National Research Conference 2013 organised by Barts and The London Academic Medicine and Surgery Society! The theme of this inaugural conference is Translational Medicine!

11/08/2013

We are excited to announce that the journal Annals of Medicine and Surgery has agreed to publish the top 10 abstracts presented at the BLAMSS National Research Conference.

Launched in 2012, Annals of Medicine and Surgery is a quarterly, peer-reviewed general medical and surgical journal that publishes original research, review articles and editorial opinion on a wide variety of topics of importance to clinical practice and biomedical science

http://www.annalsjournal.co.uk/index.php/amsjournal/index

Abstract submission closes on Saturday, 31 August 2013. Submit your abstract at:
http://www.blamss2013.org/abstract-submission

Annals of Medicine and Surgery (AMSJ) is a quarterly general medical and surgical journal that publishes new research and review articles, and editorial opinion on a wide variety of topics of importance to clinical practice and biomedical science

02/06/2013

What are clinician-scientists and how do they play a role in fostering the growth of translational medical research? Professor Nick Lemoine, Director of the Barts Cancer Institute weighs in on this issue in a perspective article, published in the journal Disease Models & Mechanisms.

Translation requires individuals who are fluent in two languages, and this is equally true of translational medicine, for which clinician-scientists are the essential conduit between laboratory and clinic. Without individuals who lead active laboratory research programmes and possess an understandin...

24/05/2013

We will also feature a plenary talk by Mr Riaz Agha, a plastic surgery trainee at Stoke Mandeville Hospital in Aylesbury and NICE scholar. He graduated from Guy's, King's and St. Thomas' Medical School in London with distinctions and 1st Class Honours in his Bachelors in Anatomy. He has won over 30 academic prizes, published 70 scientific papers and given 60 presentations at national or international level.

As a medical student, he founded the International Journal of Surgery (IJS). Published by Elsevier, the IJS is indexed in PubMed and had a 2011 impact factor of 1.293. In 2010, IJS Case Reports was launched as Elsevier’s first open access journal and recently he has launched Annals of Medicine and Surgery, a journal focussed on those in training.

Dr Agha is a Council Member for the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE), the Section of Plastic Surgery at the Royal Society of Medicine, the Elsevier Editorial System Advisory Board, Map of Medicine Fellows Board and the Association of Surgeons in Training. He has been a Clinical Supervisor at Gonville & Caius College, University of Cambridge and was on the interview panel for the Cambridge Clinical School.

Dr Agha sits on the Web Committee for the World Association of Medical Editors and has built two military websites for NATO. He was cited as an “inspirational entrepreneur” by The Rt. Hon. John Hutton MP, Former Secretary of State for Business, Enterprise & Regulatory Reform at his keynote speech during Enterprise week 2007.

In 2010, he was awarded a Scholarship from the National Institute of Clinical Excellence for his project on national surgical surveillance and in 2013 won the Gibson prize at the SARS-BBA joint meeting for his work on RCT methodological quality.

After being awarded 4 A's at A-level in 1998, he went to work for Harrods in Knightsbridge, London, for 1 year, following which he entered medical...

24/05/2013

Our fourth and final Keynote Speaker is Professor Molly Stevens, Professor of Biomedical Materials and Regenerative Medicine,
and Research Director for Biomedical Material Sciences at the
Institute of Biomedical Engineering, Imperial College London.

She joined Imperial in 2004 after a Postdoctoral training in the field of tissue engineering with Professor Robert Langer in the Chemical Engineering Department at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Prior to this she graduated from Bath University with a First Class Honours degree in Pharmaceutical Sciences and was then awarded a PhD in biophysical investigations of specific biomolecular interactions and single biomolecule mechanics from the Laboratory of Biophysics and Surface Analysis at the University of Nottingham (2000). In 2010 she was recognised by The Times as one of the top ten scientists under the age of 40 and also received the Polymer International-IUPAC award for creativity in polymer science, the Rosenhain medal and the Norman Heatley Prize for Interdisciplinary research from the Royal Society of Chemistry. In 2012 she was awarded the EU-40 Prize from the European Materials Research Society, the prestigious Griffith Medal and Prize from the Institute of Materials Minerals and Mining and the Clifford Paterson Lecture Award from The Royal Society. She has also been recognised by the TR100, a compilation of the top innovators, under the age of 35, who are transforming technology - and the world with their work. Her previous awards include the Ronald Belcher Memorial Lecture Award from the Royal Society of Chemistry (2000) and both the Janssen Prize and the UpJohn Prize for academic excellence and research.

She has a large and extremely multidisciplinary research group of students and postdocs/fellows. Research in regenerative medicine within her group includes the directed differentiation of stem cells, the design of novel bioactive scaffolds and new approaches towards tissue regeneration. She has developed novel approaches to tissue engineering that are likely to prove very powerful in the engineering of large quantities of human mature bone for autologous transplantation as well as other vital organs such as liver and pancreas, which have proven elusive with other approaches. This has led to moves to commercialise the technology and set-up a clinical trial for bone regeneration in humans. In the field of nanotechnology the group has current research efforts in exploiting specific biomolecular recognition and self-assembly mechanisms to create new dynamic nano-materials, biosensors and drug delivery systems. Recent efforts by the Stevens group in peptide-functionalised nanoparticles for enzyme biosensing have enabled the most sensitive facile enzyme detection to date and have a host of applications across diseases ranging from cancer to global health applications.

Recent News/Press Releases:

24/05/2013

Our third Keynote Speaker is Professor Charles Swanton, who is a Group Leader at the Cancer Research UK London Research Institute, and holds a Chair in Personalised Cancer Medicine, University College London (UCL) Cancer Institute, & Consultant Medical Oncologist, UCL Hospitals, London.

Professor Charles Swanton completed his PhD in 1998 at the Imperial Cancer Research Fund Laboratories on the UCL MB/PhD programme before completing his medical oncology and Cancer Research UK funded post-doctoral clinician scientist training in 2008. He was appointed Medical Research Council and Cancer Research UK senior clinical research fellow and Group Leader of the Translational Cancer Therapeutics laboratory at the CR-UK London Research Institute in 2008 focusing on personalised cancer medicine through an understanding of mechanisms of drug resistance, intratumour heterogeneity and genomic instability. He combines his laboratory research with clinical duties focused on biological mechanisms of drug resistance in lung and breast cancer.From 2008 to 2011, he worked as a consultant medical oncologist at the Royal Marsden Hospital with an interest in early phase drug development for the treatment of specific subtypes of metastatic solid tumours. He has had lead or corresponding author publications in Nature, Cancer Cell, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), Lancet Oncology and The New England Journal of Medicine. Professor Swanton is a member of several translational research scientific committees including Association for International Cancer Research (AICR) and Cancer Research UK Sciences Committee. He was made Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians in April 2011 and was appointed to the Chair in Personalised Cancer Medicine at the University College London Cancer Institute and Consultant Medical Oncologist at UCL Hospitals in November 2011.

The London Research Institute research groups are based at Lincoln’s Inn Fields and Clare Hall. Our major research themes are: the biology of tumours and tissues, cellular regulatory mechanisms and genomic integrity and cell cycle.

24/05/2013

Our second Keynote Speaker is Professor Peter J. Ratcliffe, FRS, Nuffield Professor of Clinical Medicine & Head of the Nuffield Department of Clinical Medicine, University of Oxford

Professor Peter Ratcliffe studied medicine at the University of Cambridge and St Bartholomew’s Hospital, London, graduating with Distinction in 1978. He trained as a nephrologist at Oxford, researching the pathophysiology of renal injury in shock, before switching fields to study the regulation of erythropoietin by the kidneys. The work on erythropoietin led to the discovery of a widespread system of gene regulation by oxygen, and to the elucidation of the underlying oxygen sensing process.

He has directed the hypoxia biology laboratory at the University of Oxford for more than 20 years successively in the Weatherall Institute of Molecular Medicine, the Henry Wellcome Building for Genomic Medicine, and the Henry Wellcome Building for Molecular Physiology in Oxford. He was appointed University Lecturer in 1992 and titular Professor in 1996. He was elected Nuffield Professor of Clinical Medicine in 2003, and appointed Head of the Nuffield Department of Clinical Medicine in 2004. Professor Ratcliffe has won many awards for his work on the identification of molecular mechanisms of oxygen sensing in the cell, including the Louis-Jeantet Prize for Medicine in 2009, the Canada Gairdner International Award in 2010, and the Grand Prix Lefoulon-Delalande of the Institut de France in 2012. He was elected to the Fellowship of the Academy of Medical Sciences and to the Fellowship of the Royal Society in 2002, to the membership of the European Molecular Biology Organisation (EMBO) in 2006, and to the Foreign Honorary Membership of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2007.

My laboratory works on understanding the mechanisms by which cells sense and signal hypoxia (low oxygen levels). Oxygen is of fundamental importance for most living organisms, and the maintenance of oxygen homeostasis is a central physiological challenge for all large animals. Hypoxia is an importan...

24/05/2013

Introducing our first Keynote Speaker:

Professor Sir Nicholas Wald, FRS, Director of the Wolfson Institute for Preventive Medicine at Barts & The London School of Medicine & Dentistry.

Widely considered one of the world's leading epidemiologists and neonatal health experts, Professor Wald has pioneered the field of antenatal screening for congenital malformation and made discoveries that form the basis of screening for neural tube defects and Down’s syndrome in early pregnancy. He showed, in a large randomised trial, that a lack of folic acid is a cause of neural tube defects, and that an adequate intake of the vitamin immediately before pregnancy can prevent most cases. He has demonstrated that passive smoking is a cause of lung cancer and with Professor Law showed it also increased the risk of ischaemic heart disease. Screening procedures for early detection of certain cancers, notably breast cancer, have been advanced from his work. With Professor Law, he clarified the relationship between salt intake, blood pressure and cardiovascular disease. Recent research activities include screening and treatment for Heliocobacter pylori infection and subsequent stomach cancer, and screening and treatment of hypothyroidism in pregnancy and subsequent intellectual development in children. He is the innovator of the ‘Polypill’, a radical approach to the prevention of cardiovascular disease, and trials are being developed. He has published widely in these areas over the past 30 years. His book, Antenatal and Neonatal Screening, won first prize in the BMA Medical Book Competition (2001) in the public health category.

Welcome to the Centre for Environmental and Preventive Medicine (CEPM) at the Wolfson Institute of Preventive Medicine, Barts and The London School of Medicine and Dentistry, part of Queen Mary, University of London. The main focus of CEPM is the conduct of multi-disciplinary research, often laborat...

24/05/2013

23/05/2013

What is Translational Medicine?

Clinicians and scientists from the University of Cambridge's Cancer Research UK Cambridge Institute share their views on this subject (from the perspective of cancer research) in this very insightful podcast featured in the journal Nature Reviews Cancer.


http://www.nature.com/nrc/podcast/translational.mp3