OIBC Biology Symposium
Lower Sixth Pupil, Yuki Watanabe, writes:
On Wednesday, St Edward’s hosted the annual Biology Symposium in collaboration with the Oxford International Biomedical Centre. The North Wall was at capacity with an audience made up of Teddies Sixth Form Biologists and pupils from eleven of our partnership schools. It was a privilege to attend this fantastic event, where we heard from researchers in a number of fields. This year we welcomed Mr Oliver Featherstone from the Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research, Ms Naroa Ibarra-Aizpurua from the University of Oxford, Dr Oliver McCallion from the University of Oxford and Dr Hana Hassanin from the University of Surrey.
From left: Speakers Oliver McCallion, Naroa Ibarra-Aizpura, Oliver Featherstone and Hana Hassanin
Mr Featherstone gave a fascinating talk on the future of cancer therapies. The presentation included the history of cancer treatments from when the Greeks and Egyptians first identified tumours to modern day use of radiotherapy and chemotherapy. The presentation ended on a hopeful thought of the potential use of the body’s own immune system to fight cancer, allowing cancer treatment with less fewer side effects. It was interesting not only to learn about the biology of how this could be achieved but also the hurdles and key issues that need to be overcome before bringing this sort of therapy into clinical use.
Ms Ibarra-Aizpurua is a current PhD student from the Laboratory of Molecular Neurodegeneration, who specialises in Parkinson’s disease. She talked about the use of IPSCs (Induced-pluripotent stem cells) generated from patients with Parkinson’s disease to obtain neurones and astrocytes that carry specific mutations associated with the disease. Before IPSCs were invented, they could only carry out experiments with living cells of other species such as mice, or with dead brain cells of a patient with Parkinson’s disease, therefore could not monitor the cellular processes and interactions between neurones and astrocytes. It was thrilling to hear about recently developed technology, IPSCs coming into practice with research and how with this information available, outlining therapeutic targets and even treating Parkinson’s disease might be possible in the near future.
Ms Ibarra-Aizpurua
Dr McCallion, also from the University of Oxford, gave a captivating presentation about using our own body’s cells to prevent transplant rejections. He mentioned how transplant recipients have to take hundreds of tablets a week for various purposes such as preventing rejection, which occurs when our body’s immune system recognises the transplant as foreign. These anti-rejection medications have many side effects. To tackle this problem Dr McCallion’s team have grown cells from the bodies of patients that protect the transplant and recipient, which are injected after the operation. This has not come into public clinical practice, however it has been done with several patients, and the results were promising. The presentation was engaging and it was inspiring to hear about this research which is saving lives.
Finally, Dr Hassanin spoke about the history of mRNA vaccines and the scientific approach in developing mRNA vaccines which proved successful in the COVID-19 pandemic. A lot of her presentation tallied with with the Biology A level syllabus and it was fascinating to see what we have been learning in lessons be mentioned as the ground knowledge in using mRNA in clinical practice.
The symposium ended with a general debate lead by Dr Narajos, in which we heard not only about the researchers’ current work but also about how they came to love science. It was very insightful to hear about their experience in their respective fields and stimulating for all of us wanting to pursue science as a career.