Amy Smith, Neotherix PhD CASE student at the University of Leeds, has been awarded a MeDe Early Career Researcher secondment to the University of Sheffield. This four week placement is expected to allow the exploration of the suitability of an in vitro oral mucosal model to study the performance of PhotoTherix electrospun antimicrobial-releasing tissue repair scaffolds. The University of Leeds and Neotherix have a track record of collaboration and co-development of this product concept over a number of years and this secondment will provide preclinical data on scaffold prototypes in a 3D tissue model. Dr Helen Colley and Dr Craig Murdoch at the University of Sheffield have developed an in vitro co-culture oral mucosal model which can also incorporate oral bacterial strains. Use of this model will allow screening of prototypes without the need to use animal models. Amy's project ("Tissue repair capacity of a Prototype Antimicrobial-Releasing Scaffold") is supervised by Dr Giuseppe Tronci and Dr Simon Wood from the School of Design and School of Dentistry respectively at the University of Leeds and Professor Mike Raxworthy from Neotherix. |