Profile

I always enjoyed science at school but never knew what I wanted to do. So I just kept studying the subjects that I enjoyed the most. This led me to do a PhD on stem cells. After this, I spotted a job being advertised to work with horse stem cells. I thought this sounded brilliant having always ridden and owned horses. I have now been working with horse stem cells for the past 18 years.

We use pluripotent stem cells. These cells can turn into every cell type of the body and grow forever in the lab. This means that we can use them to generate cells that the body is naturally poor at regenerating. For example, the injuries to tendons generally heal by forming scar tissue and this is not as strong as the original tissue which makes it susceptible to re-injury.

We also use the stem cells to make models of “diseases in dish”. We can turn them into the cell type that is affected in the disease to understand more about the disease process. We can also make the stem cells from different horses that have different genetic backgrounds so that we can understand more about how genetics can predispose to risk. For example, racehorses suffer from bone fractures which often result in the horse being put to sleep (horses are too big to immobilise them for long periods of time). We have used stem cells to make bone cells from horses at high and low genetic risk of fracture to understand why some horses are more at risk of having a fracture.

No two days are ever exactly the same. I work closely with all my team and my students to help them plan and interpret their experiments and results. Sometimes I am busy writing grant applications to get money to do more research. Sometimes I am writing up scientific papers. I spend a lot of time finding out about other research that is going on, either at scientific talks/conferences, or reading research papers, or talking to other people. This all helps me to come up with new ideas for the next stages of our research.