Professor of Neurogenetics, Patrick Chinnery Director of the Institute of Genetic Medicine and the Biomedical Research Centre
Genetics
"We are moving to a situation where genetics will allow us to provide personalised healthcare for people based upon a detailed and deep knowledge of the blueprint that made them up.”
The science of genetics has made dramatic strides forward in recent years, moving healthcare towards a goal of personalised medicine for people.
Ground-breaking technological developments in genetics and stem cell research may provide the key to unlocking the causes of many age related conditions and other forms of chronic disease.
The vision of medical researchers at Newcastle University is to translate scientific advances in areas such as epigenetics and cell biology into interventions and treatments that will improve the lives of patients with disease.
“This is the most exciting time of my professional career because the tools have revolutionised in the last few years,” says Professor of Neurogenetics Patrick Chinnery, who is Director of both the Institute of Genetic Medicine and the Biomedical Research Centre, which is part of the Institute for Ageing and Health at the University.
These organisations are part of the framework of eight research institutes within the University's Faculty of Medical Sciences. This forms a large element of Newcastle Biomedicine, a unique and world leading collaboration with the Newcastle Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust and other academic institutions and NHS hospitals in the North East of England.
Professor Chinnery, who trained in Newcastle, leads a team of more than a dozen researchers at the Institute of Genetics, and epigenetics is an area of investigation that offers the exciting prospect of breakthroughs in understanding the fundamental causes of disease.
He explained that decoding the human genome – the genetic code that is the blueprint for the way DNA is constructed in the cells of our bodies – has enabled researchers to begin unravelling the basic mechanisms of life.
“There are probably common mechanisms behind chronic diseases and what we want to do is unpick those, understand them, and be able to measure and influence them,” he said.
Epigenetics, which studies the process by which chemical changes occur in DNA, may offer a way of understanding what is going wrong within the genetic structure of cells that leads to disease.
Alongside the search for the causes of disease is the issue of repair and regeneration to counteract the negative effects of ageing.
What is ageing?
“What is ageing? At the level of the cell, which is the building block of the body, there’s something about that cell – in the nerves, heart or muscles – which makes it grow old and not repair itself,” says Professor Chinnery.
“The key to this is the stem cell, which can renew itself while turning into the cells of the organ of which it is part. For some reason, as you get older, these stem cells seem to disappear. The question is, can you find them and switch them on to repair organs?”
The University has research groups working on stem cells for different parts of the body such as the heart, nervous system and eyes.
Professor Chinnery combines running the research groups with his work as a hospital consultant caring for patients in his specialist field of inherited diseases of the nervous system.
With the decoding of the human genome and a consequent acceleration in genetic technologies, it has become possible in the past couple of years to diagnose, for example, most rare neurological conditions.
Newcastle Biomedicine now has a critical mass of research and clinical activity that could set the scene for important discoveries and breakthroughs in the years ahead. And the first beneficiaries of this, says Professor Chinnery, will be people living in Newcastle and the North East.
“Genetics is giving us the power to shape our lives. It will allow us to predict what conditions might affect people and tell them how they might modify their lives to avoid and mitigate those.
“We are moving to a situation where genetics will allow us to provide personalised healthcare for people based upon a detailed and deep knowledge of the blueprint that made them up.”
Contact Patrick Chinnery about his research.
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