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Insigneo Newsletter - November 2024
Welcome to our monthly Insigneo newsletter!
Our monthly e-newsletter keeps you up to date with events, funding, success stories and information. We hope you will find it useful!
Interview with Professor Enrico Dall'Ara: AI and Biomechanics in METASTRA
An interview with our Research Theme Director for Computational Modelling in Medicine, Professor Enrico Dall'Ara from the School of Medicine and Population Health, about his teams's work on the METASTRA project developing advanced computational models to help clinicians assess fracture risk for patients with cancer.
Vaginal mesh scandal: new evidence reveals further failings
New evidence of the failings of the material at the centre of the vaginal mesh scandal has been revealed by a major study by researchers at the University of Sheffield, led by Insigneo member Dr Nicholas Farr.
The study, published in the Journal of the Mechanical Behavior of Biomedical Materials, suggests that polypropylene mesh - that was widely used to treat urinary incontinence and pelvic organ prolapse often experienced by women after childbirth - can begin to degrade within 60 days of being implanted.
An international team of scientists, led by Sheffield, studied the material in sheep and found that PP mesh fibres began to degrade before 60 days, becoming stiffer and showing signs of oxidation. This degradation increased further in materials implanted for up to 180 days. Sheep models were studied due to their pelvic anatomy closely resembling humans’.
Expression of interest: Insigneo Institute Commercialisation Journey - Medical Devices Cohort
Do you have an idea for a Medical Device that would benefit patients and healthcare professionals? The Insigneo Institute is running its first Stage 1 Cohort of the Commercialisation Journey dedicated to supporting medical technologies.
This builds upon the existing benefits of the University of Sheffield’s Commercialisation Journey.
The deadline for expressions of interest is 15 November 2024, register your expression of interest here: https://forms.gle/fXtMtzuhCesprMGY8 Please make sure you contact Alex Wilkinson and arrange a meeting to discuss your eligibility.
Benefits
- Introduces you to the world of medical devices, the language used, and the clinical and commercial considerations that a successful medical device must navigate.
- A structured program of training and activities that takes you step by step through the different aspects needed to define and build a compelling business case that supports your medical device development.
- Supports discovering and defining unmet clinical needs and market access that underpins significant translational funding and onward investment for your idea
- Acquire new skills, knowledge, and experiences to develop yourself and progress your career.
Please read the information documentation and check if you meet the eligibility criteria.
Insigneo Early Career Researcher community
Our Early Career Researcher ECR group is open to all Insigneo Members who are PhD students, postdocs, fellows, lecturers and those who self-define as an ECR.
If you are not already a member of the Insigneo Institute and would like to join you can read more about the benefits and apply here: https://www.sheffield.ac.uk/insigneo/membership.
Insigneo Early Career Researcher (ECR) - Career Development Seminar
We run a series of seminars focused on career development for the Insigneo ECR community. Talks are given by Insigneo alumni on their career experiences in academia, industry, government, policy and beyond, and sharing advice and promoting discussion with ECRs.
For our next session, on Friday 22 November at 10am (online - a Google Meet link has been shared with Insigneo members), we have two speakers:
Alex Wilkinson is Insigneo's Commercialisation Manager at the University of Sheffield. Prior to joining the University, he worked with the NIHR in Research Design Services, and has a variety of expertise in project management both with and for industry.
Bart van Veen is a Senior Researcher at Impact Institute, which helps organisations manage and improve their impact. He completed his PhD in biomechanics with Insigneo at the University of Sheffield.
Insigneo Early Career Researcher (ECR) - Grant and Fellowship Writing Group
The Insigneo ECR Committee is organising a group centred around writing. The aim is to give ECRs the opportunity to discuss with their peers any fellowship/grant applications they might be preparing. We will meet for 2 hours every 2 months.
During each session, we will have one to two ECRs presenting their work, followed by a round table discussion. This group is reserved for Insigneo ECR members who are seriously considering or are in the process of writing their first grant or applying for a fellowship.
We will be running these as an in-person event, although we might consider some hybrid participation.
The next session will be 18 December at 3.15pm. Please contact Damien Lacroix (d.lacroix@sheffield.ac.uk) to express your interest in participating.
The Insigneo ECR Committee
(Malwina Matella, Neil Stewart, Juntong Lai, Hazem Toutounji, Sarah Black, Sarah Hollely, chaired by: Damien Lacroix)
Congratulations also to Stamatina Moriati from the School of Mechanical, Aerospace and Civil Engineering who passed her PhD viva!
Matina has also been awarded her FHEA certificate in teaching and published her first paper: A novel framework for elucidating the effect of mechanical loading on the geometry of ovariectomized mouse tibiae using principal component analysis (Frontiers in Bioengineering and Biotechnology)
Congratulations to Insigneo member Saira Farage O'Reilly from the School of Medicine & Population Health for passing their PhD viva!
Saira's project was about developing multi-scale models for the prediction of bone adaptation over time in the mouse tibia, specifically focusing on the skeletal diseases osteoporosis and myeloma bone disease.
This publication is also part of the main contributions of Matina's PhD. Specifically, it introduced a novel statistical framework for investigating 3D geometric change in mouse bone geometries. With the combination of longitudinal imaging, deformable registration, principal component analysis and statistical analysis, this framework identifies modes of geometric changes over time that are related to treatment and not growth/disease, are spatially heterogeneous and independent with each other.
We would like to introduce some of our new members who have joined the Insigneo Institute recently.
Find out more about Insigneo membership and our members here: https://www.sheffield.ac.uk/insigneo/membership
Sam Guttridge
Clinical Medicine, School of Medicine and Population Health
PhD Student
I am a new PhD student in the Division of Clinical Medicine, supervised by Dr Emma Lucas and Dr Mark Fenwick.
My project will investigate the specific impact of therapeutic agents for treating endometrial dysfunction on endometrial-embryo interactions.
My research will utilise two- and three-dimensional in vitro models to explore the impact of pharmaceutical exposure on processes such as senescence, inflammatory response and angiogenesis within the endometrium to understand the molecular mechanisms determining pregnancy outcomes.
Haley Stang
School of Chemical, Materials and Biological Engineering
PhD Researcher
I am currently a PhD student supervised by Dr Nicola Green, Professor Frederik Claeyssens and Professor Fiona Boissonade.
I completed a Master of Science in Biomaterials and Tissue Engineering from University College London.
Prior to my masters, I was a research intern at Harvard Medical School and completed my Bachelor of Engineering at The University of Sheffield.
My PhD will look at developing a tensile based bioreactor for the use of stretching neurons to increase axon length with the goal of reconnecting spinal cord injuries and peripheral nerve injuries.
Do you have news to share with us?
If you would like us to include information and/or events to this newsletter please email: info@insigneo.org (the newsletter will be issued during the 2nd week of the month, excluding January and August).
Insigneo members - please let us know when your students are graduating so that we can celebrate their success!
Please ensure that you submit items for inclusion with a minimum of one week's notice.
Guest Lectures, Conferences & Seminars
We will share a link to our Online Training Opportunities document here each month.
Insigneo events
28 November
Insigneo Horizon Europe event
6 December
Insigneo Mechanobiology Festive event, 2.00 - 4.30 pm, A floor Alfred Denny Conference Room.
11 December
Insigneo General Assembly
2025
6 March
Insigneo PPIE Workshop with Grace Edwards, NIHR BRC & CRF PPIE Officer
20 March
Insigneo Seminar: Professor Yalin Zheng, University of Liverpool (topic: Digital twins, AI and retinal imaging )
A selection of Insigneo seminar recordings are available to view on our YouTube channel.
Other events
15 November
Equality, Diversity and Inclusion in STEM Workshop and Networking Event 2024
18 November
Sano Seminar: Computational Models to Improve the Stratification of Patients with Spine Metastases, Professor Enrico Dall'Ara, University of Sheffield
27 November
Sano Science Day, Krakow
28 - 29 November
Life Science Open Summit Day, Krakow
2025
24-25 March
Physics of Life conference
11 - 12 June
4th Child Health Technology (CHT) Conference
For a full list of upcoming events visit: https://www.sheffield.ac.uk/insigneo/overview/events
Vacancies
Publications
Controlled dual drug release from adhesive electrospun patches for prevention and treatment of alveolar osteitis (Journal of Controlled Release) K. M. Slowik, J. G. Edmans, S. Harrison, S. M. Edwards, R. Bolt, S. G. Spain, P. V. Hatton, C. Murdoch, H E. Colley
Measurement and modeling of xenon gas transfer in the human brain with 1H and hyperpolarized 129Xe MRI (Journal of Magnetic Resonance Open) G. Norquay, M. R. Rao, J. M. Wild
Improving Xenon-129 lung ventilation image SNR with deep-learning based image reconstruction (Magnetic Resonance in Medicine) N. J. Stewart, J. de Arcos, A. M. Biancardi, G. J. Collier, L. J. Smith, G. Norquay, H. Marshall, A. C. S. Brau, R. Ma. Lebel, J. M. Wild
Shear stress is uncoupled from atheroprotective KLK10 in atherosclerotic plaques (Atherosclerosis) Z. Zhou, S.-A. Korteland, B. Tardajos-Ayllon, J. Wu, E. Chambers, J. Weninck, M. Simons, M. Dunning, T. Schenkel, M. Diagbouga, J. Wentzel, M. Fragiadaki, P. C. Evans
A novel mean shape based post-processing method for enhancing deep learning lowerlimb muscle segmentation accuracy (PLoS ONE) Z. Lin, E. Dall’Ara, L. Guo
EPAS1 Attenuates Atherosclerosis Initiation at Disturbed Flow Sites Through Endothelial Fatty Acid Uptake (Circulation Research) D. Pirri, S. Tian, B. Tardajos-Ayllon, S. E. Irving, F. Donati, S. P. Allen, T. Mammoto, G. Vilahur, L. Kabir, J. Bennett, Y. Rasool, C. Pericleous, G. Mazzei, L. McAllan, W. R. Scott, T. Koestler, U. Zingg, G. M. Birdsey, C. L. Miller, T. Schenkel, E. V. Chambers, M. J. Dunning, J. Serbanovic-Canic, F. Botrè, A. Mammoto, S. Xu, E. Osto, W. Han, M. Fragiadaki, P. C. Evans
Losartan alters osteoblast differentiation and increases bone mass through inhibition of TGFB signalling in vitro and in an OIM mouse model (Bone Reports) M. Morita, F. Arshad, L. A. Quayle, C. N. George, D. V. Lefley, I. Kalajzic,
M. Balsubramanian, T.Cebe, G. Reilly, N. J. Bishop, P. D. Ottewell
Prognostic value of stress perfusion cardiac mri in cardiovascular disease: A systematic review and meta-analysis of the effects of the scanner, stress agent, and analysis technique (Radiology: Cardiothoracic Imaging) Q. Fu, S. Alabed, S. P. Hoole, G. Abraham, J. R. Weir-McCall
Sex-specific cardiac magnetic resonance pulmonary capillary wedge pressure (European Heart Journal Open) P. Garg, C. Grafton-Clarke, G. Matthews, P. Swoboda, L. Zhong, N. Aung, R. Thomson, S. Alabed, A. Demirkiran, V. S Vassiliou, A. J Swift
Re-entry in models of cardiac ventricular tissue with scar represented as a Gaussian random field (Frontiers in Physiology) R.H. Clayton, S. Sridhar
