Waching daily May 28 2018

If you imagine you might have a toy car, and if you learn with Lego blocks how to assemble

that car, then you learn something about the car.

So we're trying to build models of tissues, so that we can try and understand things about

those tissues that ultimately will help us understand how to develop

new therapies to help people.

We're trying to build a model of muscle regeneration.

We have an interesting strategy for assembling tissues where we generate very thin layers

and then we roll them up, kind of like a fruit roll-up or a Swiss roll, into a rolled structure,

and it allows us to generate this 3D tissue.

But when we want to do our analysis, we can just unroll it to collect the cells from different

locations in our roll.

And this is important because in tissues, cells are in three dimensions, so they're

connecting with cells in all different areas, and also depending on where they are in that

three-dimensional structure, they experience different signals and different cues.

And cells are kind of like people, so they care who their neighbours are, and what environment

they're in, and they behave accordingly.

So what we need to do is be able to take cells from very specific environments and understand

how they're behaving to try and really understand how we can manipulate those interactions for

therapeutic purposes.

The work that we are doing now might take 20 years to really be having that impact,

but where there's a very imminent impact is training a generation of brave scientists

to take on the next challenges necessary.