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Improving the health of the world's population

Our main motivation is to improve the health of the world’s population. We carry out research on the major diseases and conditions affecting people across the globe, including ageing-related conditions, cancer, diabetes, infection and cardiovascular disease. Using our state-of-the-art Cardiovascular Imaging Facility, we explore specialist areas such as heart physiology, haemostasis, thrombosis and atherosclerosis.

Our exploration of the fundamental basis of the healthy and disease states focuses on identifying new strategies for maintaining and improving wellbeing. Our research incorporates experimental approaches such as bioinformatics, biomolecular, biophysical and disease modelling, and physiological, structural and systems biology. We also have research interests in novel therapies for muscular dystrophy, factors controlling fertility, hormonal control of behaviour and transmissible diseases.

We bring together world-leading academics from biomedical engineering and biomedical sciences to better develop solutions to improve healthcare and conduct cutting-edge research, particularly in specialist areas such as neural engineering, cardiovascular disease, gene therapy, and medical technology. 

Contact us

For specific enquiries, please contact:

Joint Research Division Leads

Professor Jon Gibbins

Email: j.m.gibbins@reading.ac.uk

Tel: +44 (0)118 378 7082

Dr Chris Jones

Email: c.i.jones@reading.ac.uk

Tel: +44 (0)118 378 4429

Researcher examines sample in a petrie dish

research highlights

Better baby milk

We all know that ‘breast is best’ when it comes to infant nutrition, but not all women are able to breastfeed. Yet breast milk remains the gold standard for infant nutrition and manufacturers aim to make infant formulas as close to human milk as possible.

BBSRC-funded research led by Kim Watson is working to create proteins that more closely mimic beneficial molecules found in human milk, known as human milk oligosaccharides (HMOs). HMOs are known to help ‘good’ bacteria more rapidly colonise the intestines of breast-fed infants, compared with bottle-fed infants. Kim and team are researching enzymes that are able to make 20 different products called FucOS. These can more closely mimic HMOS than the substitutes currently found in infant formula and they have shown a beneficial effect on colonies of gut bacteria.

The researchers are working with the prebiotic company Clasado Ltd, which stand to benefit from a new product range that could generate revenue of up to 22 million Euros within two years of launch. The supplements could be used more widely to support adult gut health.

Would you let your phone tell you what to eat?

Reading PhD student Rodrigo Zenun Franco has developed phone-based personalised online nutrition advice. As part of his research, Rodrigo developed an app to assess dietary intake and propose valid personalised nutrition advice for adults -because apps make it easier for people to access content, making it easier for more people to feel the benefits of tailored diet advice. Rodrigo was selected to give the University of Reading’s 2018 Fairbrother Lecture on this work.  

Measuring mood and appetite in older people

Dr Faustina Hwang and colleagues are carrying out a study to understand the links between mood, appetite and health in elderly people. The research involves using a computerised system, the ‘Novel Assessment of Nutrition and Ageing’ (NANA) toolkit to measure self-reported mood and appetite. In two studies carried out over three week-long periods, older people were assessed with NANA in the laboratory and in their own homes.

Results showed that system can be used to collect meaningful self-reported information from older people over extended periods of time and that this could be done successfully in peoples’ own homes without supervision from a researcher. The system can therefore be used to identify people who are experiencing changes in their mood or appetite, as well as understanding more about the links between mood, appetite, and other health-related variables and conditions.

Read the original research paper http://centaur.reading.ac.uk/66271/

Clues to improve cardiovascular health

It is well known that older people have a higher risk of developing cardiovascular diseases as a knock-on effect of rising levels of obesity in the population. Research led by Professor Jian-mei Li is investigating the underlying molecular mechanisms which link ageing and obesity with cardiovascular diseases.

In studies in mice they looked at the effect of atoms called reactive oxygen species (ROS) which damage DNA and cause inflammation in the lining of the blood vessels, kick-starting cardiovascular diseases. These ROS are released within our cells in response to raised levels of sugar and insulin circulating in the blood. When the scientists compared normal mice with those lacking a gene coding for a molecule called Nox2 they discovered that those mice lacking the Nox2 gene had fewer age-related cardiovascular disease symptoms – such as inflammation and high blood pressure - than normal mice. This suggests that activation of the Nox2 gene in response to ageing-associated obesity plays a key role in the development of cardiovascular diseases in older people.

Read the original research paper http://centaur.reading.ac.uk/70338/

How maternal diet influences child's future obesity

Emerging research is revealing that obesity may be programmed in early life by what mothers-to-be eat during pregnancy, but the molecular mechanisms underlying this remain largely unknown. Work from Dyan Sellayar’s group suggests that maternal obesity may promote the proliferation of specialist fat cells, known as adipocytes, in offspring. The work also suggests that maternal obesity might promote a particularly problematic type of adipocyte which plays a role in adult obesity. Since the expansion of fat tissue is closely linked with metabolic disturbances such as insulin-resistance and cardiovascular disease, the research has important implications for our understanding of how obesity, diabetes and cardiovascular disease can be programmed during our early development. 

Recent grants

  • Craig Hughes and Dyan Sellayah have been awarded two Royal Society grants totalling around £35,000
  • Jon Gibbins has been supported with a grant of £155,565 by Arena Pharmaceuticals, to extend a previous project 
  • Faustina Hwang has been awarded a £1.5 million EIT Food grant over two years.
  • Keith Foster has been awarded a Harrison Fund extension of £193,000
  • Ian Jones andAl Edwards have Innovate UK funding (with a company as the lead), to investigate monoclonal antibodies use in a vaccine platform
  • Ian Jones and Al Edwards also have a £50,000 British Council Newton Institutional link award with Thailand to explore diagnostics for Dengue Fever
  • Ian Jones, in collaboration with a Cardiff University team, has a £180,000 award from the Wellcome Trust

recent publications

Paolini, A., Omairi, S., Mitchell, R., Vaughan, D., Matsakas, A., Vaiyapuri, S., Ricketts, T., Rubinsztein, D. C. and Patel, K (2018) Attenuation of autophagy impacts on muscle fibre development, starvation induced stress and fibre regeneration following acute injury. Scientific Reports, 8. 9062. ISSN 2045-2322 doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-018-27429-7

Vajaria, R. and Vasudevan, N.  (2018) Is the membrane estrogen receptor, GPER1, a promiscuous receptor that modulates nuclear estrogen receptor-mediated functions in the brain? Hormones and Behavior. ISSN 0018-506X doi: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.yhbeh.2018.06.012

McGuffin, L., Shuid, A. N., Kempster, R., Maghrabi, A. H.A., Nealon, J. O., Salehe, B. R., Atkins, J. D. and Roche, D. B. (2018) Accurate template-based modeling in CASP12 using the IntFOLD4-TS, ModFOLD6, and ReFOLD methods. Proteins: Structure, Function, and Bioinformatics, 86. pp. 335-344. ISSN 0887-3585 doi: https://doi.org/10.1002/prot.25360

Huang, Z., Barker, D., Gibbins, J. M. and Dash, P. R.  (2018) Talin is a substrate for SUMOylation in migrating cancer cells. Experimental Cell Research. ISSN 0014-4827 doi: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.yexcr.2018.07.005 (In Press)

I Daly, D Williams, A Malik, J Weaver, A Kirke, F Hwang, E Miranda, Slawomir J Nasuto, Personalised, Multi-modal, Affective State Detection for Hybrid Brain-Computer Music Interfacing, IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing, 07 February 2018

A El-Attar, AS Ashour, N Dey, H Abdelkader, MM Abd El-Naby, R Simon Sherratt, Discrete wavelet transform-based freezing of gait detection in Parkinson’s disease, Journal of Experimental & Theoretical Artificial Intelligence, 1-17, 2018

M Wairagkar, Y Hayashi, SJ Nasuto, Exploration of neural correlates of movement intention based on characterisation of temporal dependencies in electroencephalography, PloS one 13 (3), e0193722, 2018

A El-Attar, AS Ashour, N Dey, H Abdelkader, MM Abd El-Naby, R Simon Sherratt, Discrete wavelet transform-based freezing of gait detection in Parkinson’s disease, Journal of Experimental & Theoretical Artificial Intelligence, 1-17, 2018

C Wang, Z Li, N Dey, Z Li, AS Ashour, SJ Fong, RS Sherratt, L Wu, F Shi, Histogram of oriented gradient based plantar pressure image feature extraction and classification employing fuzzy support vector machine, Journal of Medical Imaging and Health Informatics 8 (4), 842-854, 2018

M Wairagkar, Y Hayashi, SJ Nasuto, Exploration of neural correlates of movement intention based on characterisation of temporal dependencies in electroencephalography, PloS one 13 (3), e0193722, 2018

RZ Franco, R Fallaize, JA Lovegrove, F Hwang, Online dietary intake assessment using a graphical food frequency app (eNutri): Usability metrics from the EatWellUK study, PloS one 13 (8), e0202006, 2018

NJ Williams, I Daly, S Nasuto , Markov Model-based method to analyse time-varying networks in EEG task-related data, Frontiers in computational neuroscience 12, 76, 2018

E. Villeneuve, W. Harwin, W. Holderbaum, B. Janko, R.S Sherratt.  (2017) “Reconstruction of Angular Kinematics From Wrist-Worn Inertial Sensor Data For Smart Home Healthcare” IEEE Access, Special Section on Advances of Multisensory Services and Technologies for Healthcare in Smart Cities,  Volume 5, 2017, pp. 2351-2363.

C McGrath, M Ellis, S Harney-Levine, D Wright, EA Williams, F Hwang, Arlene Astell , Investigating the enabling factors influencing occupational therapists’ adoption of assisted living technology, British journal of occupational therapy 80 (11), 668-675, 2017.

 

 


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