Bournemouth’s biomedical research features in this season’s Kidney Research UK ‘Update’ magazine (page 13). We share this issue with Lauren Laverne (sort of)!
KRUK is one of Britain’s leading kidney research charities and has awarded us an Innovation Award to identify genes that underpin the development of chronic kidney disease (CKD) in diabetes. The innovative part of the research is that it uses the fruit fly Drosophila – a novel tool in the research armoury that has helped us understand the genetic basis of human development and behaviour as well as cardiovascular disease. Research at Bournemouth will use unique genetic tools to establish how insulin signalling maintains the expression of evolutionarily conserved genes that regulate kidney function in both flies and humans. This simple model organism has enormous power to help us identify new pathways of clinical significance to CKD – a condition that affects and kills thousands of people every year in the UK.
If you are keen to learn more about the research – email me at phartley@bournemouth.ac.uk