Profile

My aim is to treat diseases in the blood vessels using viruses to deliver the therapy. When the walls of a blood vessel get thicker it leaves less space for the blood to flow which can lead to heart attacks or strokes. It’s very tricky to get medicines in to blood vessel walls. Even if a drug is injected in to your blood stream it can be broken down quite quickly and won’t stick to the vessel wall. Scientists have found that we can use viruses to deliver drugs in to the blood vessel walls (and many other organs).

My work uses adenoviruses that can cause colds in babys and children. However, we have changed their DNA and removed the parts which would make you ill when you come in to contact with them. My job is to try and make these viruses attach to the blood vessel walls and pass on medicines. I can alter how well the virus attachs to the blood vessel wall by changing it’s DNA. My aim is to make a virus that attachs to the blood vessel wall and very little else!

Other people in my lab are working on biological medicines we can attach to the virus – these include genes which will stop the blood vessel walls from getting thicker or even stem cells which might help heal a blood vessel that is already damaged.

After a quick check of my emails I normally start my day by checking on cells I’m working with. The cells are a bit like my children – I have to check they look healthy everyday, feed them and remove their waste. I work with ‘cell lines’ this means the cells are all the same and come from 1 original place. I also work with ‘primary cells’ these come from tissue samples and are prepared in the lab. We work with cells from human blood vessels. We get bits of blood vessel that are left over from operations, we peel off the layer of cells we need and then grow them in a flask. This means every flask has come from a different person. These cells are really important as they mean I can test my viruses on real human cells.

After dealing with my cells I plan what else I need to do that day, this normally involves working with DNA. To try and make my virus attach to blood vessels I use ‘molecular biology’. I might change the sequence of the DNA, cut bits of DNA up, stick different bits of DNA together or check sequences of DNA. There are lots of steps and it can take weeks to make my new sequence of DNA.

I also make and purify batches of virus. This is done in my cells (good job I checked them!) we get lots of flasks and add the virus to them. The virus will go in to the cells and after a few days it has made lots of copies of itself that I need to collect. Once I’ve collected all the cells I do lots of REALLY fast spins in a centrifuge (it’s a bit like a fairground round for the cells, they get spun really fast and heavy things sink faster than light things) and can eventually collect my pure virus.

As well as working in the lab I attend quite a few meetings. Some with my whole department, some with my lab and some with just a few people – these all allow us to know what people are doing and get help when things aren’t working.

Outside of work I like to keep fit and I play netball with a local club. I also like watching films and try and got to the cinema most weeks – nothing to do with science but these are good parts of my typical day!