Invited Lecture – Angela Russell

With an increasingly ageing population, chronic diseases including cancers, dementia and heart failure are placing huge demand on society and healthcare services. Regenerative medicine approaches seek to transform healthcare management strategies, improving outcomes for patients suffering from age-related diseases. Over the past two decades the majority of studies have been focussed on the transplantation of therapeutic cells, but we now understand that in most cases these cells act not as a cell replacement therapy, but rather through the stimulation of endogenous repair pathways already present within the body. This has opened up a whole new avenue of research in the development of agents to directly stimulate these tissue repair and regeneration processes in the treatment of chronic degenerative diseases and injury, negating the need for cell transplantation. In her presentation, Professor Russell will introduce the field of drug discovery for regenerative medicine. She will talk about her own research from the application of chemistry to the discovery of small molecules and mechanisms to upregulate utrophin for the treatment of Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy, through to the development of small molecules which stimulate the production of new neurons in vitro and in vivo, and their application in models of neurodegenerative disease and ageing.