Other Training Schemes

The NIHR Imperial BRC is very pleased to announce a collaboration with The Institute of Chemical Biology EPSRC CDT in Chemical Biology – Empowering UK BioTech Innovation (ICB CDT), which will partially fund a total of five studentships recruited via the ICB CDT. There will be three studentships commencing in October 2024, with an additional two to be recruited for October 2025 entry.

The Institute of Chemical Biology (ICB) was created more than 20 years ago with a focus on the development of novel molecular tools and technologies to tackle challenges in discovery and healthcare. It then expanded its focus to include the agri-science and personal care sectors. The ICB CDT is the longest-running CDT in the UK and has graduated >380 PhD students to date, receiving the fifth renewal in March 2024.

The ICB CDT and The NIHR Imperial BRC have co-sponsored the following studentships for October 2024 entry:

Project Title: Target-directed Synthesis of Protein-Protein Interaction Inhibitors

Bracha Lawrence, supervised by Dr Anna Barnard, Professor Alan Armstrong and Dr David Mann, will be exploring how protein-protein interactions (PPIs) play critical roles in many biological pathways, the misregulation of which can result in disease. Therefore, PPIs have long been considered attractive drug targets, but the number of successful inhibitors generated remains limited. Current screening methods using established compound libraries often lack the structural properties necessary to identify inhibitors of the characteristically large and flat interfaces of most PPIs. We will combine the advantages of robotically enabled screening and a novel assay developed in the Armstrong and Mann groups to establish a high-throughput technology for the identification of PPI inhibitors with the target protein present in the screening conditions to enable it to select for its preferred ligands. This will enable the rapid identification of either peptide or small molecule ligands for any target PPI.

Project Title: Visualising the effects of pollution nanoparticles on respiratory epithelial cells at air-liquid interface

Fawaz Raja, supervised by Professor Marina Kuimova, Professor Alexandra Porter, Professor Fan Chung and Professor Ian Adcock, will be investigating pollution nanoparticles, termed particulate matter (PM), carry an enormous population health burden, through direct and indirect effects that are thought to involve oxidation and inflammation. However, currently, there is no single imaging or biochemical technique available to unequivocally assign the exact timing and the (bio)-chemical effects of PM components, thus preventing the implementation of solid strategies for the mitigation of their deleterious effects. This proposal will establish the exact site, sequence and timing of PM interaction with human airway epithelial cells and organelles. By establishing the relationship between these events this work will pinpoint the crucial subcellular processes that lead to oxidative stress and inflammation both at a single cell level and in whole cell populations. We will develop protocols to assess localisation via analytical cryo-electron microscope (cryo-EM) and direct oxidation pathways via fluorescence lifetime imaging microscopy (FLIM) in primary human bronchial epithelial cells (HBECs) grown in submerged culture and at the air-liquid interface (ALI), which is the only model that accurately reflects airway pathophysiology, for the first time.

Project Title: 3D printed synthetic tissues for patterned interactions with cellular populations

Rohan Sekhri, supervised by Dr Ravinash Krishna Kumar, Dr Yuval Elani and Professor Karen Polizzi, will examine cellular communities, consisting of cells (microbial and/or eukaryotic) living and interacting in various environments, are starting to be used in applications ranging from environmental remediation, agriculture, food science, bioproduction, and biomedicine. Moreover, it is increasingly being realized that communities of interacting cells underpin many aspects of human health (i.e. microbiomes). A global research priority therefore is to understand and engineer these communities for our own goals. Patterned population gene expression in cellular communities is critical for the establishment and development of both microbial communities and eukaryotic tissues. However, external control over target-cell populations is hugely limited due to the lack of smart-patterned release systems that can integrate and deliver effector molecules to cells when required. Here we propose to solve this, by using a custom-built 3D printer to build a smart-patterned release system for controlling population gene expression in cells with high spatial and temporal resolution. These printed systems will comprise of 100s of pL-sized aqueous droplets networked by interfaced lipid bilayers, of which we call synthetic tissues. Critically, we will develop these synthetic tissues to function in aqueous environments where encapsulated effector molecules will be released through membrane proteins present in the connected bilayers. Further, we will develop these 3D-printed patterned release systems to be robust and adaptive to their external environment, and validate our system by interrogating patterned gene expression in both defined bacterial and mammalian cell populations.

In the current BRC, we are committed to support the  UKRI AI Centre for Doctoral Training (CDT) in AI for Healthcare by co-funding five PhD Students. The centre aims to train a new generation of PhD-level researchers, including clinical PhD fellows and allied healthcare professionals, to develop AI systems that address healthcare challenges with a focus on patient needs and societal values.

Polarization/Spectral Analysis based Surgical Imaging Diagnostics

Adam Tlemsani is the PhD candidate who will be working on this project under the supervision of Abhijeet Ghosh and Daniel Elson.

GigaScale- Pioneering a Robust and Fair Foundation Model for Histopathology

Vishal Jain will be working on this project under the supervision of Bernhard Kainz and Candice Roufosse.

Deep PDE Solvers for Modelling Muscle and Brain Machine Interfaces

Noura Ezaz-Nikpay is the PhD researcher who will be working on this project under the supervision of Dario Farina and Stefanos Zafeiriou.

Interpretable neuro-symbolic approach for predicting pancreatic cancer from high-dimensional health data.

Ashwin Gupta is the researcher for this project under the supervision of Alessandra Russo and Brendan Delaney.

AI-based personalised prediction of asthma attacks in children

Felix Oury is the PhD candidate for this project who will be supervised by Reiko Tanaka and Sejal Saglani.

The NIHR Imperial BRC is delighted to be able to award up to four bursaries to home fee status participants of the MRes in Clinical Research – Translational Medicine pathway programme for the 2024/2025 academic year.

Eligibility

Bursaries are available to those currently holding an offer for the 24/25 academic year to start the MRes Clinical Research Programme (Translational Medicine pathway). The funding will only be available to Home status fee-paying applicants who have a current Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust association or have worked at the Trust within the past 5 years at any level.

Funding

Up to 4 bursaries are offered to home fee-paying students, valued at £7,450, with 50% of the award applied for the 1-year programme.

Eligibility criteria

• To be eligible to apply the applicant must be in receipt of an offer for the MRes Clinical Research – Translational Medicine to commence in October 2024.
• To receive the bursary, you must have accepted the offer and have fulfilled all offer criteria.

Application process

Applications for the MRes Programme can be made online. As part of your application please include a 1-page personal statement outlining your reasons for wishing to undertake the programme and at the top of this document clearly note your application is related to this BRC funding opportunity.

You do not need to make a separate application for the funding – your application for the MRes programme will be taken as an application for both the MRes programme and to be considered for the funding.

Deadline

Please ensure you have submitted your application no later than Friday 23^rd August 2024, 12.00 pm (UK time). Please note that this funding opportunity may close earlier if all 4 bursaries have been allocated, so applicants are encouraged to apply early.