Associate Professor Katherine Bull, Principal Investigator at the Centre for Human Genetics, is part of a major new research programme bringing together engineers and healthcare scientists from the University of Oxford and the University of Cape Town to improve technologies for diagnosing disease and understanding fundamental disease processes.
The £5 million programme, funded through the Wellcome Trust Bioimaging Technology Development initiative, will advance three-dimensional imaging of tissue at the microscopic scale, tissue-based analysis of changes in gene expression, and artificial intelligence methods. Together, these approaches aim to generate new insights from tissue samples into health and disease.
Today, pathologists diagnose disease by analysing extremely thin two-dimensional tissue sections under a microscope. However, cells, blood vessels and other tissue structures are three-dimensional. The programme will investigate how analysing complex 3D tissue anatomy can support the development of more informative disease models.
The work will focus on prostate cancer, bone marrow and skeletal health, and kidney disease, exploring fundamental pathological processes including fibrosis, inflammation and changes in the vasculature. In kidney disease, the team will look closely at lupus nephritis, which occurs when the autoimmune condition lupus affects the kidneys.
Through the collaboration with the University of Cape Town, the programme will establish an international network for lupus nephritis, with a focus on including patients who are typically under-represented in research. This will support the development of tests to help predict response to treatment and identify effective therapies as early as possible.
By working closely with the team at the University of Cape Town, we hope to develop better tools that are effective across diverse populations and can match patients with the treatments most likely to benefit them.
Associate Professor Katherine Bull
The programme is led by Professor Jens Rittscher from the Department of Engineering Science and brings together expertise from across Oxford and international partners. Alongside Katherine Bull, the Oxford team includes Professor Konstantinos Kamnitsas, Professor Ian Mills and Associate Professor Daniel Royston, with collaborators in Cape Town, Yale University, Charité in Berlin and the US National Cancer Institute.
Read the full story on the Department of Engineering Science.