News

It is with great sadness that we hear of the passing of Dr Judith Bulmer on July 21st. Judith was a highly esteemed placental pathologist who contributed enormously to placental research through her work on uterine Natural Killer cells and spiral artery remodelling. She regularly attended IFPA meetings and was also a great supporter of the CTR. She…

We are delighted that Dr Kathy Niakan will be the next Director of the CTR from October 2020. Kathy was one of the first Next Generation Fellows in the CTR, and went on to become a group leader at the CRICK Institute in London. There, Kathy’s research has focussed on studying the mechanisms determining cell fate decisions in the human early embryo,…

Congratulations to CTR Director, Prof Graham Burton, who has received the IFPA Joan Hunt Senior Award. The Award recognizes the work of established senior scientists who have led placental research groups and have made a significant contribution to the understanding of placental and reproductive functions. In this context, the Award provides a form…

We would like to congratulate our PDN colleague, and member of the CTR, Kristian Franze for his promotion to Professor of Neuronal Mechanics. The General Board has awarded Kristian the Professorship which will take effect from 1st October 2020. Kristian's research takes interdisciplinary approaches to investigate how cellular forces, tissue complia…

Advancing Human Health in the Decade Ahead: Pregnancy as a Key Window for Discovery A Burroughs Wellcome Fund Pregnancy Think-Tank.Yoel Sadovsky, MD Sam Mesiano, PhD Graham J. Burton, PhD Michelle Lampl, PhD, MD Jeffrey C. Murray, MD Rachel M. Freathy, PhD Anita Mahadevan-Jansen, PhD Ashley Moffett, MD Nathan D. Price, PhD Paul H. Wise, MD, MPH Der…

New paper in Nature Communications by the Zernicka-Goetz group shows that apoptosis and autophagy ensure aneuploid cells in early stage embryos do not proceed through post-implantation development of the fetusnot proceed through post-implantation development of the fetusImages from time-lapse series showing apoptosis of an aneuploid cell during pre…

Scientists at the University of Cambridge have suggested that subtle changes to the drugs administered to mothers threatened with preterm birth or to premature babies could further improve clinical treatment and help increase their safety. While the current practice of using glucocorticoid therapy shows life-saving benefits for the preterm infant, …

Read the full review article by authors:Simon J Tunster, Erica D Watson,Abigail Fowdenand Graham Burtonhere The placenta performs a range of crucial functions that support fetal growth during pregnancy, including facilitating the supply of oxygen and nutrients to the fetus, removal of waste products from the fetus and the endocrine modulation of ma…

The review, writen by Burton GJ, Cindrova-Davies T, Yung HW, Jauniaux E. has just been published in Reproduction. You can read the full article here

Professor Wolf Reik has been appointed the Institute’s Acting Director with immediate effect, following the sad loss of Professor Michael Wakelam at the end of March. Professor Reik is an internationally renowned expert in the field of epigenetics and has led the Institute’s Epigenetics research programme since 2008. He has been the Institute’s Ass…

Living cells adapt their stiffness to that of their surroundings, or not?New study by the Franze lab published in Nature Materials could have disproven a central dogma of mechanobiology: that living cells adapt their stiffness to the stiffness of their microenvironment.Scientists have developed a new method that allows the measurement of the mechan…

The paper by Yassen Abbas, Margherita Y Turco, Graham J Burton and Ashley Moffett brings together engineering skills in microfluidics with a biological question that is central to placental development.You can read the full article hereAbstractBACKGROUNDIn humans, inadequate trophoblast invasion into the decidua is associated with the ‘great obstet…

The ten-eleven translocation factor TET1 and its conferred epigenetic modification 5-hydroxymethylcytosine (5hmC) have important roles in maintaining the pluripotent state of embryonic stem cells (ESCs). We previously showed that TET1 is also essential to maintain the stem cell state of trophoblast stem cells (TSCs). Here, we establish an integrate…

Lipidomics is of increasing interest in studies of biological systems. However, high-throughput data collection and processing remains non-trivial, making assessment of phenotypes difficult. We describe a platform for surveying the lipid fraction for a range of tissues. These techniques are demonstrated on a set of seven different tissues (serum, b…

Roser, Group Leader at the Wellcome Sanger Institute and Member of the CTR, will use single-cell technologies to understand human immune response to SARS-CoV-2 infection and the progression of the disease.Joint project leader with Esteban Ballestar from the Josep Carreras Institute, Roser and her collaborators will study positive samples from up to…