Funding boost puts faculty at the forefront of biological research

Researchers at the University of Leeds have secured a total of £8.1m in investment with collaborators to address major health challenges.

Two Discovery Awards led by Drs. John Barr, Martin Stacey and René Frank in the Faculty of Biological Sciences will accelerate knowledge in emerging viruses and Alzheimer’s disease.

Funded by Wellcome, the awards support bold and creative research with the potential to deliver significant advances in human health.

The faculty has a strong track record of securing Discovery awards, with these latest successes bringing the total number of awards to six.

Andrew Macdonald, Pro-Dean for Research and Innovation, Faculty of Biological Sciences said:

“These awards both highlight the talent and tenacity of our staff whilst reinforcing our reputation in research excellence. This is a fantastic example of how bold and creative ideas, aimed at tackling some of the world’s biggest issues, are at heart of what we do.”

If you want to push boundaries of fundamental knowledge, you can do it here in the Faculty of Biological Sciences. A huge congratulations to our staff – these awards are extremely well deserved.

How are bunyavirus replication factories built?

Drs. John Barr and Martin Stacey, Dr Juan Fontana, Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (CSIC), Bilbao, Spain, Dr Estibaliz Gomez de Mariscal, NOVA University of Lisbon, Portugal

Drs. John Barr and Martin Stacey will use powerful, high-resolution 3D imaging techniques, such as advanced cryo-electron microscopy, to investigate how bunyaviruses—an emerging group of viruses influenced by climate change and land management—cause disease.

The project will use a step-by-step process to understand virus ‘factories’ – where virus building blocks in the cell are produced and then assembled into new virus particles, enabling the virus to spread.

As part of the £3.3 million project, the international team of researchers will identify the critical cellular components that the virus needs and the cellular structures that are re-purposed, as well as determine the detailed structure of the factory itself.

New understanding of how biological mechanisms of virus ‘factories’ work could one day lead to new vaccines and antiviral drugs for currently untreatable bunyaviruses – a group of viruses which World Health Organisation lists as ‘priority pathogens’ requiring urgent development of treatments. 

Dr. John Barr said:

This award will allow the group to investigate a massive gap in our understanding of how bunyaviruses cause disease. Gaining this grant is the culmination of some amazing recent work that the team has done in past years, making viruses that we can track in cells using the incredible imaging systems we have available at Leeds.

Seeing inside the brain: the in-tissue structure of living and postmortem Alzheimer’s disease human donor brain by high-resolution cryo-electron tomography

Dr René Frank, Dr Ross Paterson (UCL)

Dr. René Frank, who previously led work which visualised protein structure within Alzheimer’s disease brain for the first time, has teamed up with Ross Paterson (UCL) and a team of international collaborators to explore how Alzheimer’s progresses over many decades and how common genetic risk factors drive disease progression.

One of the great challenges in Alzheimer’s is how the disease spreads insidiously within the brain decades before the first symptoms start to show. Consequently, we are in some respects completely in the dark on how early-stage Alzheimer’s disease develops.

This £4.8 million study will use new integrative imaging technologies to visualise molecular and cellular structures at source in human donor tissues. We will link these molecular maps to genotype and phenotype in cohorts of early and late-stage Alzheimer’s disease.

No research team has ever conducted a study of this kind before now. Researchers hope that a better understanding of the pathological mechanisms in Alzheimer’s disease brain will open new pathways for future treatments.

Dr René Frank said:

“We are inspired by exciting progress by the Alzheimer’s disease research community that has led recently to the first disease-modifying therapeutics.”

This is of course the beginning and we are driven by the urgent need for better therapeutics. This award will enable us to contribute to this effort by working with patients to study the disease in new ways that we hope will rationalise and guide therapeutic development.

Transforming healthcare across the globe

Commenting on the awards, Professor Darren Tomlinson, Head of the School of Molecular and Cellular Biology said:

We have an unrivalled environment here at Leeds, with world-class structural biology facilities and access to clinical infrastructure. Together with big investments like this, we can drive forward innovative solutions and transform healthcare across the globe.