2016 Archive
- New Microneedle Platform Technology
- 5th UK & Ireland FOAM/OpenFOAM User Day
- Science Apprentice
- Neograft Teams with CÚRAM Research Group
- Ciara Giles Doran won a silver medal at SSRA16
- Fengzhou Fang
- Dr Peter Theobald will present research on novel material structures
- Image Guided Navigation in Airways - Monday 18th April, 1pm, room 204
- MME PhD takes pride of place in UCD's Women's GAA
- Traumatic Brain Injury seminar - Monday 7th March, room 204
- Industrial giant Bekaert launches University Technology Centre in UCD
- Engineers Journal to run series of articles from UCD
- 5th year student braves dragons on Hackathon winning team
- PhD student, Kevin Doherty, wins the IOM3 World Lecture Competition.
- UCD students win ESB Engineering Challenge…again!
- UCD getting ready for launch – MASER 13 rocket featured on SSW
- Presenting in the Dragon’s Den – Barry Brophy meets Bobby Kerr
- UCD to take lead on European Space Agency project
- Biomedical Engineering awarded EU funding for diabetes research.
Traumatic Brain Injury seminar - Monday 7th March, room 204
Monday, 27 June, 2016
MME 2001 graduate, Dr John D. Finan, Northshore University, Chicago, gives a talk entitled "Mechanisms and Treatment of Traumatic Axonal Injury". This highlights groundbreaking research in the field of traumatic brain injury (TBI) which is the the leading cause of death among young people in the developed world.
Traumatic brain injury (TBI) is the leading cause of death among young people in the developed world and a substantial cause of morbidity among those who survive. More than 30 clinical trials have been conducted with candidate therapies for TBI and all have failed, despite the fact that most were supported by promising, pre-clinical, rodent data. This uniform failure indicates that new pre-clinical tools are needed that can reproduce human pathophysiology and accelerate the search for lead compounds.
To this end, we have engineered an in vitro system to produce traumatic injury in human neurons derived from induced pluripotent stem cells. This system was built in-house to apply a repeatable stretch insult uniformly to each neuron at strains and strain rates typical of clinical TBI. We have demonstrated that we can produce clinically relevant pathology in a dose dependent manner and detect the therapeutic effect of neuroprotective agents. This creates an opportunity to rapidly and cheaply identify new drug candidates.
In addition to serving as a drug discovery tool, this system also enables a number of novel basic science experiments. It can compare pathology in isogenic populations of human neurons with a single genetic difference to test the influence of genetics on pathology. Also, we are creating a new model of axonal degeneration as a biomechanical phenomenon driven by elastic instability.
In another project, we are studying the effect of repeated mechanical insult on the formation and dissolution of stress granules to better understand the neurodegenerative consequences of repeated mild TBI. By combining insights from these experiments and incrementally increasing the complexity of our human in vitro TBI model, we intend to recreate the clinical challenge from the ground up to discover new mechanisms and treatments for this devastating disorder.
Biography:
John is a Research Scientist with NorthShore University Health System. The laboratory that he directs is focused on the mechanisms and treatment of traumatic brain injury. After obtaining his PhD in Biomedical Engineering in 2010 from Duke University, focusing on cell mechanics and mechanotransduction, he worked as a Postdoctoral Research Scientist at Columbia University. He obtained his BE (Mechanical) degree from UCD in 2001.
For further details, contact: neal.murphy@ucd.ie