Submitted by D.P. Juan on Wed, 30/04/2025 - 16:38
The Department recently hosted its first-ever Alumni Engagement Webinar!
This webinar's goal was to inform our alumni about how they can support the Department. Professor Mark Howarth and Dr Cathrine Wilson also presented a summary of their work to further engage the audience in the Department's research.
Introduction:
An overview of the Department’s history and a summary of how donations support Departmental activities.
Professor Mark Howarth’s talk, “Bacterial Superglue to protect from as yet unknown diseases”:
Professor Howarth’s talk covered harnessing extremely strong interprotein bonds, engineering the exceptional reactivity found amongst Streptococcus pyogenes surface proteins.
This superglue system has been used in the lab’s Spy toolbox, a system already used by hundreds of labs worldwide, and for a range of vaccine candidates.
The group is also deeply involved with promoting entrepreneurship. Howarth group alumni have gone on to found startups, such as Zya and Genie Biotech.
Dr Cathrine Wilson’s talk, “Mending a Broken Heart with mRNA”:
Dr Wilson’s talk focused on the group’s research into heart muscle regeneration via the Myc protein and cell-free mRNA therapy.
The end goal of this research is to stimulate heart muscle renewal. The group has demonstrated that an experimental therapeutic mRNA treatment increases human heart muscle function within a laboratory setting.
The group is now focused on optimising this initial therapy, particularly on increasing its longevity and specificity.
How to support the Department:
If you are interested in ways you can support the Department, we highly encourage you to visit our Department’s dedicated fundraising page: https://www.phar.cam.ac.uk/outreach/support-department.