• Question: In what direction do you see your research going in the future? and how much do you think it`ll help the future prevention of conditions such as youve mentioned before?.

    Asked by Bombtrack to vediacan, Alex, Laura, Lesley, Richard on 13 Jun 2015. This question was also asked by Hoffsdtater.
    • Photo: Richard Prince

      Richard Prince answered on 13 Jun 2015:

      Hi Bombtrack,
      My current research project is on lung power in brass musicians. If we can prove that brass band players have better lung function, I’d love to get a project going to see if learning an instrument could help people with lung conditions like asthma (who don’t already play). That might sound a bit whacky, but playing a brass instrument is one of the most strenuous activities you can do with your lungs and learning to play would be a fun form of physiotherapy!
      Best wishes
      Richard

    • Photo: Laura Newton

      Laura Newton answered on 13 Jun 2015:

      Hey!

      At the moment (and for the next few years) I’m trying to find out exactly what happens in skin when it’s hit by UV light (the dangerous part of sunlight) and how we can detect this damage. This will help us detect damage earlier and hopefully prevent or treat it before people develop full skin cancer. Hopefully it will also suggest new and better ways of treating people who already have it.

      It’s also been suggested that some of the things that go wrong after UV exposure might be the same things that go wrong in loads of other diseases (such as diabetes and Alzheimer’s), so further into the future it would be interesting to find out if they are the same and if my detection method will be useful for these diseases too.

      Thanks for your question!
      Laura

    • Photo: Lesley Pearson

      Lesley Pearson answered on 15 Jun 2015:

      I work on what you might call ‘early stage’ drug discovery.
      We take interesting academic research and turn it into something that pharmaceutical companies could use to make a new drug. So I work on a lot of different projects all of the time.

      So in one way you could say that my research is going to stay the same: I am going to work on projects that aren’t yet ready to be turned into drugs, and make them ready. But since the type of target I work on (i.e. the disease area) is always changing, the direction in that sense will change depending on what other scientists are working on. The next ‘big discovery’ about a disease and it’s cause could very well turn into my next project.

      Right now I think that I am likely to be working on antibiotics. Antibiotic resistence (the fact that a lot of bacteria are no longer killed off by medicines designed to fight them) is becoming a major problem and lots of brilliant scientists are working on it. I would very much like to join them.

    • Photo: Vedia Can

      Vedia Can answered on 15 Jun 2015:

      Hey Bombtrack 🙂

      I know that the research I am conducting will have a positive impact in my research field, and it will encourage more of my peers to develop drugs specifically for Osteoarthritis. During my PhD I hope to confirm that Osteoarthritis is an inflammatory mediated disease, to take my research findings forward in the future. I also hope to prove that the panel of peptides I am using holds the cure for Osteoarthritis. I think that once my peers agree that Osteoarthritis is an autoimmune condition, and that it is mediated by an inflammatory pathway, they could help devise treatment options (apart from joint replacements) that specifically targets Osteoarthritis. Not only will this prevent the onset of this disease but it will also treat sufferers.

      Best Wishes,

      Vedia

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