2017 is the UK-India Year of Culture, a year of events to celebrate UK’s cultural ties with India. The two exhibitions are part of the University of Cambridge Museums’ India Unboxed series, affiliated to the UK/India 2017 programme run by the British Council.

From Kabul to Kolkata: Highlights of Indian painting in the Fitzwilliam Museum, showcases a selection of Indian miniature paintings and drawings from the 16th to 19th centuries. Works produced under the patronage of the Mughal dynasty and other princely rulers are included, as well as several acquired by early British patrons and collectors in India.

Religious epic and myth, history, royal portraiture, hunting, natural history, music and architecture are all included in the themes of the paintings and drawings on show. A new catalogue exploring the themes of the exhibition has been written by Marcus Fraser, Honorary Keeper of Islamic and Indian Manuscripts and Miniatures at the Fitzwilliam Museum.

Elephants, Deities and Ashoka’s Pillar: Coins of India from antiquity to the present explores the history of India through coins produced from the 4th century BC until recent times. Cultural, religious, economic and political developments are richly illustrated by the coins on show. They focus on representative periods of India’s history, ending with a display of banknotes and coins produced since India became independent in 1947.

The exhibitions are accompanied by a full programme of public events, including handling sessions of historic coins, lunchtime talks, art workshops and family events.

The Director of the Fitzwilliam Museum, Tim Knox, said: “The Fitzwilliam Museum has a significant collection of Indian miniature paintings and drawings, the majority unpublished and little known. Many of these exquisite, finely detailed works are going on display for the first time. Our coin and medal collections are internationally celebrated and we are delighted to join this important year of Indian culture with some of our finest Indian treasures.”

From Kabul to Kolkata: Highlights of Indian painting in the Fitzwilliam Museum is on show until September 3, 2017 in the Shiba Gallery. Elephants, Deities and Ashoka’s Pillar: Coins of India from antiquity to the present is on show until October 1, 2017 in the Octagon Gallery. Entry to the Fitzwilliam Museum is free.

Twenty years ago, a team of scientists at the University of Cambridge developed a test of ‘cognitive empathy’ called the ‘Reading the Mind in the Eyes’ Test (or the Eyes Test, for short). This revealed that people can rapidly interpret what another person is thinking or feeling from looking at their eyes alone. It also showed that some of us are better at this than others, and that women on average score better on this test than men.

Now, the same team, working with the genetics company 23andMe along with scientists from France, Australia and the Netherlands, report results from a new study of performance on this test in 89,000 people across the world. The majority of these were 23andMe customers who consented to participate in research. The results confirmed that women on average do indeed score better on this test.

More importantly, the team confirmed that our genes influence performance on the Eyes Test, and went further to identify genetic variants on chromosome 3 in women that are associated with their ability to “read the mind in the eyes”.

The study was led by Varun Warrier, a Cambridge PhD student, and Professors Simon Baron-Cohen, Director of the Autism Research Centre at the University of Cambridge, and Thomas Bourgeron, of the University Paris Diderot and the Institut Pasteur.

Interestingly, performance on the Eyes Test in males was not associated with genes in this particular region of chromosome 3. The team also found the same pattern of results in an independent cohort of almost 1,500 people who were part of the Brisbane Longitudinal Twin Study, suggesting the genetic association in females is a reliable finding.

The closest genes in this tiny stretch of chromosome 3 include LRRN1 (Leucine Rich Neuronal 1) which is highly active in a part of the human brain called the striatum, and which has been shown using brain scanning to play a role in cognitive empathy. Consistent with this, genetic variants that contribute to higher scores on the Eyes Test also increase the volume of the striatum in humans, a finding that needs to be investigated further.

Previous studies have found that people with autism and anorexia tend to score lower on the Eyes Test. The team found that genetic variants that contribute to higher scores on the Eyes Test also increase the risk for anorexia, but not autism. They speculate that this may be because autism involves both social and non-social traits, and this test only measures a social trait.

Varun Warrier says: “This is the largest ever study of this test of cognitive empathy in the world. This is also the first study to attempt to correlate performance on this test with variation in the human genome. This is an important step forward for the field of social neuroscience and adds one more piece to the puzzle of what may cause variation in cognitive empathy.” 

Professor Bourgeron adds: “This new study demonstrates that empathy is partly genetic, but we should not lose sight of other important social factors such as early upbringing and postnatal experience.”

Professor Baron-Cohen says: “We are excited by this new discovery, and are now testing if the results replicate, and exploring precisely what these genetic variants do in the brain, to give rise to individual differences in cognitive empathy. This new study takes us one step closer in understanding such variation in the population.”

Reference
Warrier, V et al. Genome-wide meta-analysis of cognitive empathy: heritability, and correlates with sex, neuropsychiatric conditions and cognition. Molecular Psychiatry; 6 June 2017; DOI: 10.1038/MP.2017.122

​If you only glanced at a recent YouGov survey, you might think that a large majority of the UK is in agreement about Brexit. The electorate may have divided pretty evenly in the referendum, but now the 45% of “hard leavers” are joined by 23% who “voted to remain but still think the government has a duty to bring the UK out of the EU”.

One reading of this poll is that the country is now uniting behind Brexit. As YouGov headlined its report: “Forget 52%. The rise of the ‘re-leavers’ mean the pro-Brexit electorate is 68%.”

But to conclude that the country is uniting would be shallow, and for prime minister Theresa May, at least, dangerous.

Most people now accept Brexit, but that doesn’t mean they believe in it. Re-leavers are addressing a genuine philosophical problem: should you change your beliefs when you find yourself in the minority?

Jean-Jacques Rousseau once wrote:

When a law is proposed in the people’s assembly, what is asked of them is not precisely whether they approve or reject, but whether or not it conforms to the general will that is theirs. Each man [sic], in giving his vote, states his opinion on this matter, and the declaration of the general will is drawn from the counting of votes. When, therefore, the opinion contrary to mine prevails, this proves merely that I was in error, and that what I took to be the general will was not so.

Put to one side the fact that Rousseau thought citizens should reflect in solitude on what was best for the country and that they should not discuss their views before voting.

Rousseau’s point was that the result, when it came, revealed the true will of the people. If you find yourself in the minority, it means you were wrong. Brexit, one might conclude, was the correct choice. The 48% were simply in error.

A different view is associated with the liberal tradition. Being in the minority says nothing about “right” and “wrong”. It announces simply that you lost. Nothing more, nothing less.

This is an important distinction. If being in the minority means you were wrong, then presumably you wouldn’t be crazy to change your mind. After all, if we assume that everybody is equal in their ability to judge these questions, then the majority is more likely to be right.

But if being in the minority simply means that you lost, then perhaps it’s important that you don’t change your mind, that you don’t stop arguing the issue, and that you don’t stop using all the constitutional means at your disposal to press your case. It is vital to keep alive the arguments that lost the day because in a democracy you always get to fight another one.

Keeping alive those arguments is often difficult. There is always pressure on those who lost to admit they were wrong, to pretend they’ve changed their minds, or at least to shut up. The famous phrase “tyranny of the majority” was never just about protecting minority rights; it was about recognising the force of majority opinion.

To suggest that the UK is uniting around Brexit, then, is a danger to democracy itself. That danger comes from pressure on the losers to actually change their minds. Worryingly, this now seems to be May’s position. As she said in a campaign speech near Middlesborough:

You can only deliver Brexit if you believe in Brexit.

I'm not a ‘re-leaver’”, she seemed to be saying. “I’m now a true believer, and you should be too.”

The other danger is to May. If she thinks the country is really uniting around Brexit, then she could do worse than talk to the street musician interviewed by the Financial Times a few weeks ago: “I don’t think the referendum will be overturned. People seem to think of it as "the people’s vote” and to overturn it would in some way be seen to be undemocratic. People who voted Remain are powerless at the moment.“

He’s right. Those who voted to stay in the EU lost and are, at the moment, powerless. However, politics can change pretty quickly. Support for going ahead with Brexit is broad but shallow. If the economy starts getting worse, the true believers may march on undaunted, eyes fixed firmly on the horizon, but the re-leavers may find their doubts coming back to the surface.

The more salient number in the survey might turn out to be the true believers, who say they will stick with Brexit whatever the consequences: and that’s only 45%.

This article was originally published on The Conversation. 

In research published today in Nature, researchers at the University of Cambridge and the University of Nottingham demonstrate how pig embryos and human embryonic cells show remarkable similarities in the early stages of their development. By combining these two models, they hope to improve our understanding of the origins of diseases such as paediatric germ cell tumours and fetal abnormalities.

Primordial germ cells, the precursors of eggs and sperm, are among the earliest cells to emerge in human embryos after implantation, appearing around day 17, while the surrounding cells go on to form the rest of the human body. However, little is understood about how they originate. Currently, the law prohibits culture of human embryos beyond 14 days, which prevents investigations on this and subsequent events such as gastrulation, when the overall body plan is established.

Now, researchers have used a combination of human and pig models of development to shed light on these events. They have shown for the first time that the interplay between two key genes is critical for the formation of the germline precursors and that this ‘genetic cocktail’ is not the same in all species.

First, by using human pluripotent embryonic stem cells in vitro, scientists led by Professor Azim Surani at the Wellcome Trust/Cancer Research UK Gurdon Institute established a model that simulates genetic and cellular changes occurring up to gastrulation. Human pluripotent embryonic stem cells are ‘master cells’ found in embryos, which have the potential to become almost any type of cell in the body.

As these stem cells can be multiplied and precisely genetically manipulated, the model system provides a powerful tool for detailed molecular analysis of how human cells transform into distinct cell types during early development, and which changes might underlie human diseases.

The work shows that when an embryo progresses towards gastrulation, cells temporarily acquire the potential to form primordial germ cells, but shortly afterwards lose this potential and instead acquire the potential to form precursors of blood and muscle (mesoderm) or precursors of the gut, lung and the pancreas (endoderm). The model also tells us that while the genes SOX17 and BLIMP1 are critical for germ cell fate, SOX17 subsequently has another role in the specification of endodermal tissues.

For an accurate picture of how the embryo develops, however, it is necessary to understand how cells behave in the three-dimensional context of a normal embryo. This cannot be achieved by studies on the most commonly used mouse embryos, which develop as egg ‘cylinders’, unlike the ‘flat-disc’ human embryos. Pig embryos, on the other hand, develop as flat discs (similar to human embryos), can be easily obtained, and are ethically more acceptable than working with non-human primate (monkey) embryos.

Researchers from the University of Nottingham dissected whole flat discs from pig embryos at different developmental stages and found that development of these embryos matches with the observations on the in vitro human model, as well as with non-human primate embryonic stem cells in vitro.  For example, pig germ cells emerge in the course of gastrulation just as predicted from the human model, and with the expression of the same key genes as in human germ cells. Human and pig germ cells also exhibit key characteristics of this lineage, including initiation of reprogramming and re-setting of the epigenome – modifications to our DNA that regulate its operations and have the potential to be passed down to our offspring – which continues as germ cells progress towards development into sperm and eggs.

The combined human-pig models for early development and cell fate decisions likely reflect critical events in early human embryos in the womb.  Altogether, knowledge gained from this approach can be applied to regenerative medicine for the derivation of relevant human cell types that might be used to help understand and treat human diseases, and to understand how mutations that perturb early development can result in human diseases.        

Dr Ramiro Alberio, from the School of Biosciences at the University of Nottingham, says: “We’ve shown how precursors to egg and sperm cells arise in pigs and humans, which have similar patterns of embryo development. This suggests that the pig can be an excellent model system for the study of early human development, as well as improving our understanding of the origins of genetic diseases.”

Dr Toshihiro Kobayashi in the Surani lab at the Gurdon Institute, adds: “We are currently prevented from studying human embryo development beyond day 14, which means that certain key stages in our development remain a mystery. The remarkable similarities between human and pig development suggest that we may soon be able to reveal the answers to some of our long-held questions.”

The research was supported by Wellcome.         

Reference
Kobayashi, T et al. Principles of early human development and germ cell program from conserved model systems. Nature; 7 June 2017; DOI: 10.1038/nature22812

The answer is India – and Cambridge. Among the many millions of objects held across the University’s eight museums, Botanic Garden, Centre for South Asian Studies, and University Library, are a huge number of wonders related to the world’s largest democracy.  

The stories behind some of these singular objects are being told in a series of short films as part of a year-long celebration across the University and city of Cambridge to mark the UK–India Year of Culture 2017.

To celebrate the 70th anniversary of Indian independence in 2017, Cambridge has turned its gaze eastwards with India Unboxed – to highlight the astonishing artworks, artefacts, orchids and scientific instruments that have made their way to Cambridge over the past 800 years.

The films will explore and explain why a tin of Fine Indian and Ceylon Tea was packed for an Antarctic expedition at the turn of the 20th century; how a brass transit instrument was used in the Great Trigonometrical Survey of India; and what a gharial actually is.

Malavika Anderson, Cultural Programmer for the University of Cambridge Museums, said: “The collections of the University of Cambridge Museums include a fascinating variety of objects, specimens, art works, photographs and manuscripts from across South Asia.

“India Unboxed is a fantastic opportunity to celebrate these significant collections - to look closer at the fascinating and often complex stories of identity and connectivity between the UK and the Indian subcontinent. Throughout this year the University of Cambridge Museums will host special exhibitions, events and experiences that invite you to explore India through our collections. 

India Unboxed is rooted in the University’s museum collections, and involves academics, local diasporic communities and artists from India and the UK. The rich programme creatively unpicks the tangled relationships of the two countries, fusing historical context with contemporary perspectives.

The India Unboxed film series begins The Perfection of Wisdom – taking a close look at the world’s oldest dated and illustrated Sanskrit manuscript, held at Cambridge University Library.

Over the course of six centuries Cambridge University Library’s collection has grown from a few dozen volumes on a handful of subjects into an extraordinary accumulation of several million books, maps, manuscripts and journals.

The library is also home to an extraordinary collection of Buddhist works, amongst which is one very important Sanskrit palm leaf manuscript.

This manuscript is about a thousand years old and has one of the most famous titles in world literature — the Aṣṭasāhasrikā Prajñāpāramitā or The Perfection of Wisdom in 8,000 Lines. The Perfection of Wisdom offers a path to enlightenment and signifies the formal introduction to Buddhist thought.

Certain events from the Buddha’s life feature prominently: his birth, his first teaching, his death, the attack by an elephant, the monkey giving him honey, and his return to Sāmkāśya after teaching his mother in heaven.

Added Anderson: “The many beautiful and perfectly preserved images are tiny but incredibly complex at the same time. Given that the nature of the medium, the palm leaf, places many restrictions on what an artist can do, the variety and detail in the illustrations of these manuscripts is astonishing.

“To this day,1,000 years on, the palm leaf manuscripts are still helping to further research on the intellectual traditions, religious cults, literature and political ideas of South Asia.”

Over the course of the series, Cambridge University Library is one of just eleven collections showcased in film. Other collections include: the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, the Cambridge University Botanic Garden, the Museum of Classical Archaeology, the Fitzwilliam Museum, the Sedgwick Museum of Earth Sciences, the Whipple Museum of the History of Science, Polar Museum, and the archives of the Centre of South Asian Studies.

For more information about the India Unboxed exhibitions, events, digital interventions, discussions and installations, visit www.india.cam.ac.uk

It used to be all about fleabane for bites from venomous beasts, mugwort to induce and ease the pain of labour and boiled bedstraw to stimulate clotting. According to Nicholas Culpeper in his 1652 book The English Physitian, “a man may preserve his Body in Health; or cure himself, being sick, for three pence charge, with such things only as grow in England”.

Prescient words, in some respects – today it’s still all about giving the right patient the right drug, at the right dose at the right time, but it’s called precision medicine.

In fact, herbal remedies and small-molecule pharmaceuticals have dominated therapeutic medicines since Culpeper’s time, before being joined in the 1980s by ‘biologics’ when it became possible to build new forms of proteins, hormones, receptors and monoclonal antibodies after the DNA code was cracked in Cambridge in 1953.

Science moves fast and we now stand at the threshold of not one but several step changes. New understanding of the structures of cells and systems biology is pioneering the use of human and microbial cells as therapeutic agents. Meanwhile, novel bioelectronic medicines or ‘electroceuticals’ are shifting the therapeutic approach away from traditional medicines into optics, electronics, instrumentation and software. What will these and other developments in areas such as immunotherapy and nanotherapy mean to medicine over the next hundred years? And what’s taking place now in Cambridge to help this happen?

There seems little doubt that with increased genetic knowledge, precision medicine will define the 21st century. The development of massively parallel DNA sequencing by the Department of Chemistry moves us closer to the prospect of sequencing one billion kilobases per day per machine. Genomic information and computational approaches will refine diagnoses, stratify cancer into subtypes, guide personalised treatments and improve the efficiency of clinical trials.

Meanwhile, cell-based technologies provide exquisitely selective delivery agents that are naturally able to perform therapeutic tasks. In Cambridge, progress in regenerative medicine promises benefits for replacing human cells, tissues or organs; and the use of stem cells to manage and treat diabetes, degenerative nerve, bone and joint conditions, and heart failure.

The convergence of information technologies like augmented reality, cloud-based applications, artificial intelligence and deep learning in digital healthcare will play an increasing role in medical decision support, robotic nursing and surgery, sensors and diagnostics, and so on.

So-called beyond-the-pill services, such as wearables, apps, medical tattoos and point-of-care sensors will offer consumers digital devices for monitoring health and compliance, although issues such as privacy, data integrity and cybersecurity remain concerns to be resolved satisfactorily in the ‘internet of people’.

Research into these key future technologies is being conducted in the Departments of Engineering, Materials Science and Physics, and the Centre for the Physics of Medicine. Meanwhile, the newly established Alan Turing Institute and the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence bring world-leading expertise in big data, computer science, advanced mathematics and artificial intelligence. 

How is the pharmaceutical industry responding to these shifting patterns in modern medical treatments? Global research-based companies have suffered from the downturn in the global economy, the demise of the blockbuster era and the rise in specialist markets. Industry is adapting by placing more emphasis on new therapeutic modalities and repurposing existing drugs, as well as strengthening academic–pharma collaborations at earlier stages of the drug discovery process.

The Milner Therapeutics Institute, due to open in 2018, will foster close collaborative interactions between academia and industry to accelerate medical advancement via an ‘open borders’ paradigm. So too will Apollo Therapeutics, a £40m collaboration between the tech transfer offices of Cambridge, Imperial College London and University College London and three global pharmaceutical industries (AstraZeneca, GSK and Johnson & Johnson) to streamline the academia-to-industry pipeline.

New technologies are likely to change the regulatory, legal and policy environments, and business models. For example, some forms of medicine – like gene editing – are both personalised and curative. How will the costs of research, development and marketing for ‘cures’ be met if the business model is more likely to be a service than a product?

Understanding complex issues such as these will be aided by the networks and convening power established by the Centre for Science and Policy, which coordinates the best scientific thinking to inform public policy, and the Centre for Law, Medicine and Life Sciences, which focuses on the legal and ethical challenges at the forefront of biomedicine. Meanwhile, the Institute for Manufacturing is analysing supply chains, and the Judge Business School is studying the management of innovation and entrepreneurship.

It’s likely that future healthcare will have a different geometry. A complex interplay of patients, industries and service operators will use sophisticated diagnostic tools, digital scrutiny and interpretation using artificial intelligence, and have access to an extensive toolbox of therapeutic approaches, all personalised to the individual patient, and available through a redesigned primary and hospital healthcare environment.

Cambridge is well placed to drive innovation in this highly multidisciplinary therapeutic scenario.

The University has expertise relevant to all stages of the drug discovery, development and manufacturing process, from fundamental biology/chemistry, through drug development and clinical trials, to imaging, safety, delivery, supply-chain management and entrepreneurship.

There’s also large-scale investment in research and infrastructure for tackling disease. Take dementia, for instance: more than £17m awarded by the UK Research Partnership Investment Fund will help build a Chemistry of Health building for chemistry-based research in neurodegenerative diseases. Cambridge also hosts one of three UK Drug Discovery Institutes funded by Alzheimer’s Research UK (ARUK), and is one of five centres that will form the UK Dementia Research Institute, funded by the Medical Research Council, Alzheimer’s Society and ARUK.

Against this backdrop of activity, the Cambridge Academy of Therapeutic Sciences (CATS) has been established to increase the linking of academic research to big pharma, biotech and NHS structures on the Cambridge Biomedical Campus and in the region. The idea is to create a networking, training and enterprise structure that transcends traditional boundaries between clinicians, academics and industrialists, in which fundamental and applied research into diagnostics and therapeutics can flourish and be translated into patient treatments with maximum efficiency.

The time is ripe for this to happen. AstraZeneca’s move to Cambridge, combined with close links with GSK and other big pharma companies, as well as the thriving local biotechnology industrial environment and sister institutes like the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, provide substantial impetus to co-develop and co-deliver these programmes.

In fact, one might thank Nicholas Culpeper for his vision for the future of medicine and at the same time upgrade his estimate of ‘three pence charge’ with 36 decades of financial inflation.

Inset image: Research Horizons special issue on future therapeutics.

Thousands of students will take part in the May Bumps this year – but what are the Bumps and where is the best place to watch them?

Well – the May Bumps take place in June (of course) and involve rowing crews chasing one another along the River Cam with the aim to, well, bump into each other.

All 31 pf Cambridge's colleges take part, alongside Anglia Ruskin University, with the 150 plus boats being divided into nine divisions, each division containing around 17 boats.

​The May Bumps start on Wednesday, conclude on Saturday and there are several places to view them from.

A popular spot is the Plough Pub which has a garden overlooking the River Cam at a spot, called Plough Reach, where bumps often take place and where crews usually do a practice start for the crowds on their way up-river before each division begins.

Many people sit on Grassy Corner which allows for good views along the course and places you on the towpath side of the river (be warned - the path can be very busy during races so be aware that cyclists will go past you at speed). For those who like to be closer to the finish there is plenty of room for food and views on Ditton Fields which allows spectators to see boats heading down the Long Reach towards the end of the race.

To all the crews taking part: have a good race.

Kholwa: The Longing of Belonging showcases the work of South African photographer Sabelo Mlangeni who dreamt up the exhibition during conversations with Joel Cabrita, a researcher from Cambridge’s Faculty of Divinity, who is researching the history of Zionism in South Africa. ‘Kholwa’ means ‘belief’ in isiZulu, one of the most widely spoken languages in South Africa.

Approximately 30 per cent of all South Africans are members of a Zionist church. Zionism (unrelated to Jewish Zionism) is the country’s largest popular religious movement but began life as a 20th century Protestant faith healing movement, originating in the small town of Zion (pop. 24,000), Illinois, in the largely white Midwest of the USA.

Cabrita’s work charts the dramatic shift and 20th century expansion of Christianity and seeks to explain how Zionism travelled across the Atlantic Ocean and became one of the most important influences in black communities more than 8,000 miles away. With approximately 15 million members, it is the largest Christian group in the region.

Mlangeni is a member of the Zionist church and his grounding in the religion can be traced in the intimate and person portraits of church members going on display in Cambridge. He and Cabrita are interested in examining what is at stake when a photographer turns his camera on a religious community they are part of.

Mlangeni said: “The biggest question for me is being part of the community, part of the church. How can I point out other people as being ‘amakholwa’ (‘the believers’) when that is what I myself am? This is a body of work that doesn’t ‘look’ at the Zionist church. It is very important for me to emphasise this, I am not interested in exotifying the church.

“I want to look at people gathering beyond church, and the strong spiritual relationships, which also include me. A long time before even studying photography, I made a lot of work about the church and church members. So my camera was in the church for a long time, church people knew me with a camera. When I look at this work, what’s important is the sense of intimacy between me and the church.”  

“For me the most important part of meeting with Joel Cabrita is that it brought something new to me, an understanding of where the Zionists came from, what their beginnings were, where the church was really born [in the USA].”

Some of Mlangeni’s images portray the umlindelo amakholwa (the night vigil of believers). This all-night service forms the cornerstone of Zionist worship across South Africa.

The service consists of long nights of the entire community gathered in longing expectation for the spirit to descend, whether ancestral spirits or the Christian God. Song, prayer, sermons and dance see the believers through the night. Umlindelo amakholwa is the occasion when bonds of solidarity and community are cemented between those who spend the night in expectant waiting. As dawn breaks, the believers make their way home, while some head to a full day of work. 

“Zionism was founded in the in the American Midwest in the 1890s and spread to South Africa in 1904 via missionaries and the circulation of faith-healing literature,” said Cabrita. “From the small town of Wakkerstroom, near the village of Driefontein where Sabelo grew up, Zionism spread across the region with migrant labourers returning from Johannesburg’s gold mines. Today, Zionism has adapted to African understandings of the world, with few traces of its North American roots. Southern African Zionists remain committed to the power of prayer to heal bodily illness as their American forebears.”

Working mainly in black and white, Mlangeni’s photographs focus on capturing the intimate, everyday moments of communities in contemporary South Africa. His work includes ‘Big City’ (2002 to 2015) which focuses on Johannesburg’s history, and ‘Country Girls’ (shot between 2003 and 2009), which focuses on gay communities in rural South Africa, especially in the area of Driefontein, his own village in the province of Mpumalanga.

As a childhood friend of many of his subjects, Mlangeni has been able to create photographs from a perspective of unique understanding and membership of the community he is portraying. Throughout his work, Mlangeni avoids ‘othering’ or ‘exoticising’ his subjects, and instead attempts to show the multi-faceted, intimate reality of daily life of these individuals. While many of them face discrimination due to their sexual identities, or are living in precarious socio-economic situations, Mlangeni’s work does not cast his subjects  as ‘victims’ but rather portrays their resilience, joyfulness and dignity as ordinary people.

“His photography continually erases and removes the boundaries between observer and subject,” added Cabrita. “Mlangeni is portraying his own belief as much as he is exploring the spiritual commitments of his photographic subjects.

“They chart his own journey towards belong, and longing for belonging within the Zionist community, a journey that has been mediated through a photographer’s lens. While some photographs reveal open, friendly gazes, others confront us with turned backs, inscrutable silhouettes and hidden figures buried deep in pictures, hinting at anonymity, inaccessibility and profound longing.”

Kholwa: The Longing of Belonging– which runs from June 13-September 10 – is free to the public. Visit www.maa.cam.ac.uk for further details and opening times.

Dr Gavin Jarvis from Cambridge’s Department of Physiology, Development and Neuroscience re-examined data going back to the 1940’s and concluded that previous claims about natural embryo mortality are too often exaggerated. His report is published in F1000Research.

“Trying to determine whether a human embryo survives during the first days after fertilisation is almost impossible,” says Dr Jarvis. “A woman can only suspect that she is pregnant, at the earliest, two weeks after fertilisation, when she misses a period. Using sensitive laboratory tests, embryos can be detected as they implant into the womb about one week after fertilisation. What happens before then under natural circumstances is anyone’s guess.”

In 1938, two doctors in Boston, Dr Arthur Hertig and Dr John Rock, became the first people to see a human embryo when they examined wombs removed from women during surgery. They estimated that a half of human embryos die in the first two weeks after fertilisation. However, Dr Jarvis’s re-analysis of this data shows that this figure is so imprecise as to be of little value.

“I think it is fair to say that their data show that embryos can and do fail at these early stages, and also that many do just fine, but we could say that even without the data,” he adds. “Hertig’s samples, whilst descriptively informative, are quantitatively unhelpful. It doesn’t take us much further than where we would be without the data.”

Pregnancies are also lost after the first two weeks and currently published estimates of total embryo loss from fertilisation through to birth range from less than 50% to 90%. Embryo mortality of 90% implies that only 10% of embryos survive to birth, implying that human reproduction is highly inefficient.

Since 1988, several studies on women trying to get pregnant have provided a more consistent picture. The earliest point at which pregnancy can be detected is one week after fertilisation when the embryo starts to implant into the womb of the mother. At this point the hormone hCG, which is used in regular pregnancy tests, becomes detectable. Among implanting embryos, about one in five fail very soon and the woman will have a period at about the expected time, never suspecting that she conceived. Once a period is missed and pregnancy confirmed, about 10-15% will be lost before live birth, mostly within the first few months. In total, once implantation starts, about two thirds of embryos survive to birth. The number of embryos that survive and die before implantation remains unknown.

Modern reproductive technologies have enabled fertilisation to be observed directly in the laboratory. Poor survival of in vitro embryos may have contributed to the pessimistic view about natural human embryo survival, says Dr Jarvis.

“Fertilising human eggs and culturing human embryos in the laboratory is not easy. A large proportion of eggs fertilised in vitro do not develop properly even for a week. Of those that do and are transferred into women undergoing IVF treatment, most do not become a new-born baby.”

This failure of in vitro embryos may reflect the natural situation. Alternatively, the artificial environment of reproductive treatments may contribute to the high failure rate of IVF embryos. Dr Jarvis’s re-analysis of the data suggests that the latter is the case.

“It’s impossible to give a precise figure for how many embryos survive in the first week but in normal healthy women, it probably lies somewhere between 60-90%. This wide range reflects the lack of relevant data. Although we can’t be precise, we can avoid exaggeration, and from reviewing the studies that do exist, it is clear that many more survive than is often claimed,” concludes Dr Jarvis.

Reference
Gavin E Jarvis. Early embryo mortality in natural human reproduction: What the data say. f1000research; DATE; DOI: 10.12688/f1000research.8937.2

Gavin E Jarvis. Estimating limits for natural human embryo mortality. f1000research; DATE; DOI: 10.12688/f1000research.9479.2

Dr Laura Moretti, from the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at Cambridge, came across an unknown children’s picture-book, dating from 1766, under the title of Ise fūryū: Utagaruta no hajimari (The Fashionable Ise: The Origins of Utagaruta) while on a study trip with her students.

The British Library copy, part of the collection belonging to Sir Ernest Satow, a 19th century British scholar and diplomat, is a picture-book adaptation of Ise Monogatari. Translated into English as The Tales of Ise, it is one of the most important works in Japanese literature and was originally composed probably in the late 9th century following the protagonist, Ariwara no Narihira, through his many romances, friendships and travels.

The Tales of Ise has since been adapted and reinterpreted continually down the centuries as part of the canon of Japanese literature.

“If we were to hazard a comparison, The Tales of Ise could be seen as the equivalent of the works of Shakespeare in terms of canonical status in Japan but I had never heard of or seen a children’s adaptation before – no-one knew of this book,” said Moretti. “This is a missing piece of the jigsaw. No one ever knew if it had been rewritten for children – but now we know. And it was sitting in the British Library all along.”

Dr Moretti’s new book, Recasting the Past (Brill, 2016), presents a full-colour reproduction of the 18th century edition, alongside a transcription in modern Japanese, an English translation, and textual analysis. The publication of the 1766 adaptation of the Tales of Ise fills a gap in scholars’ understanding of the work’s history. Although much scholarship has taken place on the reception of Tales of Ise and its target audiences in different epochs, no one has previously explored the age of its readership.

The 1766 introduction by the publisher shows that the book was intended to be read by children and there are various clues to support this view. The main character Narihira first appears as a young boy at school, a portrayal which encourages young people to identify with him. The whole text is also written using mainly the phonetic syllabary which could be understood by readers with only two years of schooling. The story was also abbreviated to include only 13 of the original 125 episodes –  making it easily accessible to a broad readership and was useful for introducing those with basic literacy to Japan’s cultural heritage. The book would have educated children in the narrative of The Tales of Ise as well as the aesthetic quality of the poetry.

Moretti, though, counters the notion that only children would have read Utagaruta no hajimari, and argues that the text could also work as a substitute of the The Tales of Ise for those adults with limited linguistic and cultural literacy.

Now, after several years of negotiating the necessary permissions to use the two complete extant copies (one held at the National Institute of Japanese Literature and the other at the Gotoh Museum, both in Tokyo; alas the British Library copy has only one volume of three) and to finish the transcription, translation and textual analysis, Utagaruta is available again for readers to enjoy – more than 250 years after it was first printed.

While graphic novels and comic books such as manga remain hugely popular in Japan and across the world today, instances of books where images and text are interdependent abound in pre-modern and early-modern Japanese literature. In this specific case, Moretti shows that the primary function of images was to complement the prose by filling in the gaps left by the narrative. Images set the scene for the story and helped to characterize the protagonists by depicting their dress and physical appearance.

Moretti believes that studying this children’s adaptation can give a contribution to the study of children’s literature in general, discovering aspects that might not be apparent in other cultures.

“Utagaruta no hajimari, for example, is trying to draw children into the world of the adult, rather than shield them from it by introducing children to sex and appropriate romantic behaviour,” she said.

“A vast number of early-modern Japanese picture-books that adapt canonical literature awaits to be studied. This research is the first step in the foundation of this field of study. If appropriately developed, it has the potential to shed light onto new sides of children’s literature as well as to advance in the understanding of how early-modern Japanese graphic prose functioned.” 

“Like many people of my age, I have to take pills morning and night. I’m pretty good at taking them in the evenings, mainly because my wife makes me! But, left to my own devices in the mornings, I only remember to take them perhaps one day out of four,” says Dr Jag Srai.

“Wouldn’t it be fantastic if smartphones could remind patients, capture use and track activity, blood pressure, sugar level, and so on? And if, at the same time, their GP could see this data and call them in if there’s a problem?”

He explains that upwards of 30% of prescribed drugs are not taken by patients and, in the case of respiratory drugs, where application is more intricate, 70% are not taken as directed. The numbers vary depending on the type of condition being treated but they are disarmingly high across the board. This has consequences, and not only for the patient. The cost to the taxpayer of drugs that are not being used is considerable and reduces the pot of money available for patient care.

“In a world of scarce resources this in itself seems incredibly wasteful. But there are other reasons to be concerned,” adds Srai, who is Head of the Institute for Manufacturing (IfM)’s Centre for International Manufacturing. “Around 50% of patients taking antibiotics don’t complete the course. The consequences of this are potentially catastrophic as infections become increasingly resistant to drug treatment. And drugs contain active ingredients which, when disposed of inappropriately, end up as contaminants in our water supply.”

Tackling the thorny problem of patient compliance is just one aspect of the pharmaceutical industry that Srai and his team at the IfM are looking to revolutionise. They are working with other universities and major UK pharmaceutical companies AstraZeneca and GSK to make improvements across the whole supply chain, from how a pill is made to the moment it’s swallowed by the patient.

Advances in genetics and biochemistry are helping us move towards a much more tailored approach to medicine, focused on more targeted or niche patient populations, and ultimately the development of bespoke treatments to meet individual patient needs. The implications for how the pharmaceutical industry manufactures its medicines and gets them to the patient are clearly immense.

Most pharmaceutical manufacturing still takes place in huge factory complexes, where large volumes of chemicals are processed in a series of ‘batch-processing’ steps, and often a dozen or more are required to produce the final oral dose tablet. Developing new drugs is an expensive business and so big pharma companies hope for a ‘blockbuster’ drug – a medicine that could be used to treat a very common condition, such as asthma or high blood pressure, and which can be manufactured in large quantities.

But, says Srai, the manufacture of these blockbuster drugs is becoming a thing of the past. The batch process is costly, inefficient and makes less sense when producing medicines in small volumes.

New ‘continuous’ manufacturing processes mean that drugs can be made in a more flow-through model, requiring fewer steps in the manufacturing process, and in volumes better aligned with market demand. In the case of small volume manufacture, this technology breakthrough can support the move towards more personalised medicine.

“Combine this with the way in which digital technologies are transforming supply chains – through flexible production and automation, using sensors to track location, quality and authenticity, and big data analytics on consumption patterns – and it’s clear that the pharmaceutical industry is on the cusp of a huge change,” adds Srai.

Recognising this, and to make sure they harness the value these advances in science and technology can deliver, pharmaceutical companies are working together in a number of ‘pre-competitive forums’.

The IfM team is playing a key part in two major related UK initiatives: the Continuous Manufacturing and Crystallisation (CMAC) Future Manufacturing Research Hub based at Strathclyde University, funded by £10m from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council and a further £31m from industry; and REMEDIES, a £23m UK pharmaceutical supply-chain sector project, jointly funded by government and industry.

CMAC is focused on the move to continuous manufacturing and REMEDIES on developing new clinical and commercial supply chains. Srai’s team is leading the work on mapping the existing supply chains for different types of treatment, and modelling what the future might look like.

“We can envisage a future in which for some medicines, production is no longer a highly centralised large-scale batch operation but one where manufacturing is more about continuous processing, more distributed in nature, smaller scale and closer to the point of consumption.”

Asked how local this can become, Srai adds: “In some instances we are already able to ‘print’ tablet medicines on demand, and we are now exploring whether this might take place at more local production/distribution sites, or at the local pharmacy or even in our own homes. Of course, some critical hurdles still need to be overcome, not least in terms of assuring product quality at multiple sites and establishing appropriate regulatory regimes.

“New technologies are also opening up other possibilities in the way that patients receive healthcare. Wearable and smartphone apps could be feeding diagnostic and health information to our doctors – be they human or (with the advances in artificial intelligence) robot – who would assess our symptoms remotely. We may change our consultation habits completely and only go to the doctor for very specific types of treatment. Indeed, in the UK today, trials suggest some 30% of GP visits are unnecessary.”

As part of the REMEDIES project, the IfM team has been exploring the possibilities presented by technologies that are available now such as Quick Response (QR) codes that can be scanned by mobile apps on our smart phones – and how they can help ensure that patients are taking their medicine.

“A relatively easy thing to do with packaging is to use it as an information source for patients. For example, packs of pills come with a small leaflet that hardly anybody reads. If we want to help patients adhere to their treatment regimes, can we support them by giving them this plus more useful information in a more accessible electronic format?”

The REMEDIES team is working on a mobile phone app that will allow patients to read the instructions on their phone (in a font size and language of their choice) or listen to some explanatory audio or watch a video. “This is simple, readily available technology that could have a significant impact on compliance,” says Srai.

The potential for exploiting data to deliver bespoke healthcare in the future is enormous. With smart packaging, smartphones and wearable devices, information can become increasingly dynamic and interactive. Indicators such as time, location – even mood – can affect whether and how drugs are taken; and data such as blood pressure and pulse can show the effect they have on the patient.

“As in the world of e-commerce, we are at the early stages of understanding how this consumer and patient data can inform the supply chain,” says Srai. “But we can now contemplate scenarios in certain therapeutic areas, in which each dose a patient takes is fully optimised for the here and now, and manufactured continuously, or even printed on demand.”

And if the patient forgets to take it, they will, if they choose, be reminded to do so by a very insistent app.

Inset image: Research Horizons special issue on future therapeutics.

Among the investors in the new funding round is Cambridge Innovation Capital, which invests in companies based on valuable intellectual property in the Cambridge Cluster, or with links to the University of Cambridge. The University is the largest investor in Cambridge Innovation Capital (CIC), which was founded by Cambridge Enterprise, the University’s commercialisation arm, in 2013. 

Bicycle Therapeutics is developing a new class of drugs called ‘Bicycles’, which are based on small protein chains, or peptides, which have been chemically constrained, and have a similar shape to a bicycle wheel. They have been designed to combine the best features of small molecule and antibody based drugs. The science behind the creation of Bicycles is based on work initiated at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology by Professor Sir Greg Winter, a pioneer in monoclonal antibody development and the Master of Trinity College, working together with Professor Christian Heinis from the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne.

‘Bicycles’ have a range properties which make them an excellent choice as a potential drug. They have the binding capacity and specificity of an antibody, but can penetrate tissue such as solid tumours easily because of their relatively small size. In addition, due to their small size and peptidic nature, they are cleared from the body via the kidneys, allowing them to be designed in such a way as to maximise their efficiency while minimising the chance of any side effects.

Bicycle Therapeutics’ most advanced potential product, known as BT1718, is the first example of its Bicycle Drug Conjugate® (BDC) technology, in which the Bicycle is targeted to bind specifically to malignant tumours and is harnessed to a chemical payload designed to destroy cancer cells once it reaches its target.

BT1718 targets a cell surface protein called Membrane Type 1 Matrix Metalloproteinase (MT1-MTP). MT1-MTP occurs in high concentration in many solid malignant tumours. Consequently BT1718 may have the capacity to become a treatment for a range of cancers which currently do not have good treatment options such as ‘triple negative’ breast cancer and non-small cell lung cancer. It is expected to enter clinical trials in 2017 in partnership with Cancer Research UK.

Bicycle Therapeutics is not the first start-up in which Professor Winter has been involved. Cambridge Antibody Therapeutics, the discoverers of rheumatoid arthritis drug Humira, and Domantis were both based on his work on therapeutic monoclonal antibodies. This work has enabled great improvements in the treatment of cancer and immune disorders and, as a result, many of the world’s blockbuster pharmaceutical drugs are based on the techniques he developed.

“The pre-clinical studies to date show Bicycles have many of the attributes needed to be an effective medical treatment,” said Dr Michael Anstey, Investment Director at CIC. “The next big step is to take this into humans and if they show the same characteristics this will be very exciting. Bicycle Therapeutics is an ambitious company, with a world-class team, that has all the ingredients for another Cambridge success story.”

“I am delighted that Bicycle Therapeutics has secured this new funding to enable the team to move multiple programmes into the clinic,” said Professor Winter. “Bicycles are different from both antibodies and small molecules, with some of the benefits of each, giving them the potential to deliver an exciting new class of therapeutics across different diseases.”

“This financing represents an important validation of our approach, while providing Bicycle Therapeutics with the resources to continue to turn our bicyclic peptide technology into important new treatment options for patients,” said Dr Kevin Lee, Bicycle Therapeutics’ CEO. “We are grateful for the strong support from our investors as we move BT1718 rapidly towards the clinic and continue to advance our other preclinical programmes, that have the potential to treat cancer and other debilitating diseases.”

Professor Theresa Marteau, Director of the Behaviour and Health Research Unit and a fellow of Christ’s College, has been appointed a Dame of the British Empire for her services to public health. Her work on the development and evaluation of interventions to change behaviour in diet, physical activity, tobacco and alcohol consumption is aimed at improving population health and reduce health inequalities, with a particular focus on targeting non-conscious processes.

“This is a huge honour,” says Professor Marteau, who is also a fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences and of the Academy of Social Sciences. “It is wonderful to have recognition for the contribution that behavioural science can make to improving the health of the population. I am also proud to be a role model to more junior women scientists.”

Also recognised is fellow public health expert Professor Carol Brayne, who has been made a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) for services to public health medicine. Professor Brayne is a Fellow of Darwin College.

As Director of the Cambridge Institute of Public Health, Professor Brayne’s research interests have focused on dementia and brain health with ageing, particularly on population studies for policy and planning, risk and protective factors, as well as scientific understanding of what dementia in older populations really looks like. Her studies have shown that dementia has declined age for age in contemporary UK populations and the possible protective role of modifiable factors such as education.

Professor Brayne is a fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences and has leadership roles for Public Health nationally, regionally and locally. “It is a great honour to receive this award and I’m privileged to work in public health with outstanding colleagues, in a field that contributes so much to the health and wellbeing of the public worldwide,” she says.

Professor Serena Best of the Department of Materials Science and Metallurgy has also been awarded a CBE, for services to Biomaterials Engineering. She is co-director of the Cambridge Centre for Medical Materials, which is developing next-generation medical materials to interact therapeutically with the body.

Professor Best’s research aims to expand the range and performance of bioactive scaffolds in clinical applications. She is Senior Vice President of the Institute of Materials, Mineral and Mining and a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering.

Professor Best, a fellow of St John’s College, says: “The honour reflects the impact of materials and engineering in the development of improved healthcare technologies. In receiving this award, I would also like to acknowledge the important contribution of the team in Cambridge.”

Professor Alexandra Walsham of the Faculty of History has also been made a CBE, for services to history. Her research focuses on the religious and cultural history of early modern Britain and she has published widely in this field.

A fellow of Trinity College, Professor Walsham has been a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society since 1999 and was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 2009 and of the Australian Academy of the Humanities in 2013.

The recognition of distinguished female academics at Cambridge has been welcomed by Professor Eilis Ferran, Pro-Vice-Chancellor for Institutional and International Relations, who says: “These honours recognise exceptionally talented women across the disciplines at Cambridge. Not only do they highlight their outstanding academic achievements, they celebrate the seminal contributions to the fields of public health, engineering and history they have made.”

Gender Champion-Elect at the University of Cambridge, Professor Valerie Gibson, says: “This is a tremendous achievement by our senior women academics and recognises just some of the serious talent that Cambridge has to offer.”

Fellow Gender Champion-Elect Professor Sarah Colvin adds: “The range of achievements of the women who are being honoured – across public health, engineering, and modern history – is a good reflection of the diversity of that talent. Huge congratulations!”

When the body’s repair system kicks in, in an attempt to remove the dead heart cells, a thick layer of scar tissue begins to form. While this damage limitation process is vital to keep the heart pumping and the blood moving, the patient’s problems have really only just begun.

Cardiac scar tissue is different to the rest of the heart. It doesn’t contract or pump because it doesn’t contain any new heart muscle cells. Those that are lost at the time of the heart attack never come back. This loss of function weakens the heart and, depending on the size of the damaged area, affects both the patient’s quality of life and lifespan.

“In many patients, not only is their heart left much weaker than normal but they are unable to increase the amount of blood pumped around the body when needed during exercise,” explains Dr Sanjay Sinha. “I’ve just walked up a flight of stairs… it’s something I take for granted but many patients who’ve survived heart attacks struggle to do even basic things, like getting dressed. While there are treatments that improve the symptoms of heart failure, and some even improve survival to a limited extent, none of them tackles the underlying cause – the loss of up to a billion heart cells.”

The numbers are stark. “Half a million people have heart failure in the UK. Almost half of them will not be alive in five years because of the damage to their heart. At present, the only way to really improve their heart function is to give them a heart transplant. There are only 200 heart transplants a year in the UK – it’s a drop in the ocean when many thousands need them.”

Sinha wants to mend these hearts so that they work again. “Not just by a few percent improvement but by a hundred percent.”

He leads a team of stem cell biologists in the Cambridge Stem Cell Institute. Over the past five years, with funding from the British Heart Foundation, they have been working with materials scientists Professors Ruth Cameron and Serena Best and biochemist Professor Richard Farndale on an innovative technique for growing heart patches in the laboratory – with the aim of using these to repair weakened cardiac tissue.

“In the past, people have tried injecting cardiomyocytes into damaged hearts in animal models and shown that they can restore some of the muscle that’s been lost,” says Sinha. “But even in the best possible hands, ninety percent of the cells you inject are lost because of the hostile environment.”

Instead, the Cambridge researchers are building tiny beating pieces of heart tissue in Petri dishes. The innovation that makes this possible is a scaffold. “The idea is to make a home for heart cells that really suits them to the ground. So they can survive and thrive and function.”

The scaffold is made of collagen – a highly abundant protein in the animal kingdom. Best and Cameron are experts at creating complex collagen-based structures for a variety of cell types – bone marrow, breast cancer, musculoskeletal – both as implants and as model systems to test new therapeutics.

“The technology we’ve developed for culturing cells is exciting because it is adaptable to a huge range of applications – almost any situation where you’re trying to regenerate new tissue,” explains Best.

Best and Cameron use ‘ice-templating’ to build the scaffold. They freeze a solution of collagen, water and certain biological molecules. When the water crystals form, they push the other molecules to their boundaries. So, when the crystals are vapourised (by dropping the pressure to low levels), what’s left is a complex three-dimensional warren.

“We have immense control over this structure,” adds Cameron. “We can vary the pore structure to make cells align in certain orientations and control the ratios of cell types. We are building communities of millions of cells in an environment that resembles the heart.”

The Men's Division saw Lady Margaret M1 remain Head of the River from Lent bumps, despite a spirited performance from Clare M1. The Women's Division saw changes at the top as Jesus W1 fought their way up to take Head of the River, taking over from Lent's leader, Downing W1.

For full results charts and results by College, see bumps.camfm.co.uk.

​The bumps are run by Cambridge University Combined Boat Clubs (CUCBC), which provides bumps tables showing where each crew starts in the Men's Division and Women's Division and a list of the best places to view next year's bumps.

Over the past year, a four-strong team has had over a hundred meetings with scientists at three UK universities. By the end of this year, they will probably have had another hundred.

The team is garnering the most comprehensive sense of what’s happening at the bench across three UK universities – Cambridge, Imperial College London and University College London (UCL) – that anyone has ever amassed. Their job is to identify research that has the greatest potential of making it all the way through to becoming a new medicine, and then to help this happen. This is Apollo Therapeutics.

Dr Richard Butt, who heads up the team, explains the drive behind their meetings: “We live in an age of rapidly escalating biomedical innovation – an age where the development of new medicines should be at an all-time high. But the number of new drugs being developed is largely static.”

In drug discovery, the period between getting promising results in an academic lab and receiving real interest from an investor or pharmaceutical company has been called the ‘Valley of Death’ – and not without good reason. Discovering and developing potential new medicines requires not just money but also expertise and the rapid delivery of industrial-type science. Most drug candidates succumb along the way, long before it’s possible to know whether they might have fulfilled an unmet medical need.

In January 2016, the tech transfer offices (TTOs) of Cambridge, Imperial College and UCL joined forces with three global pharmaceutical companies – AstraZeneca (AZ), GSK and Johnson & Johnson – to create a £40m collaboration called Apollo Therapeutics. Their aim is to streamline the academia-to-industry pipeline by “finding the best translatable science, funding it fast and running the right development programme to make it attractive to industry,” says Butt.

In effect, Apollo aims to maximise the chance that a potential drug will be developed from emerging basic science by investing in a state-of-the-art drug discovery programme that a pharma company will find attractive to license.

“The Apollo approach is wholly new and revolutionary,” says Dr Iain Thomas, Head of Life Sciences of Cambridge Enterprise (Cambridge’s TTO). “You could say that Apollo is building reassurance. The hardest part of our job at Cambridge Enterprise is selling really good technology to pharma. It relates to the psychology of buying – people don’t buy complicated stuff with lots of risk without a lot of analysis. Reassurance comes from being engaged with an opportunity for a long time.”

Engagement and partnership are at the heart of the Apollo model. First, Butt’s team speaks to the academics and TTOs of the universities to identify exciting prospects, before taking some of the ideas to the wider team of investors (each of the three companies and the TTOs). “As scientists, we will always be very happy to spend time engaging in discussions with any academic about their work. As drug discoverers, we’ve been very picky about what to take forward,” he says. “We filter very aggressively to maximise the chance of success.”

Once a project is selected for investment, Apollo and the academics work together to develop the discovery to a stage that will be attractive to a company to license and take further.

This work might take place in the academic’s laboratory, or in one of the pharma companies, or in a contract company. It might also take place at the Milner Therapeutics Institute – research laboratories that will open on the Cambridge Biomedical Campus in 2018 dedicated to fostering close collaborative interactions between academia and industry.

“The key is bringing together the skill sets, philosophies and expertise of those who discover with those who know what to do with that discovery,” says Dr Ian Tomlinson, Chair of Apollo. “We are all motivated by the goal of finding new medicines for patients.”

Tomlinson adds: “The conventional pipeline works like this: an academic does some great science, takes it as far as they are able to within the confines of the lab and then, if they want to take it further, either forms a spin-out or licenses to pharma. This still has its place, but it takes time and is costly. If Richard’s team brings the investment team an idea that looks good, Apollo can fund it and be working with the academic in a matter of weeks.”

Between them, Butt and his three colleagues have over 60 years of experience of the pharma industry. “We’ve been at the sharp end of drug discovery and failure,” he says. “We saw the boom of the late 80s/early 90s of drug approvals. And then genomics, high-throughput screening and a seeming wealth of targets led to the mindset of ‘we can scale this success’ – if we run three times more projects we’ll be three times more successful’. The basic biology almost ceased to matter. Projects were run that shouldn’t have been. R&D costs escalated but the output of new drugs flat-lined or even declined.

“Apollo is led by the science we see. The academic fully understands the biology and mechanisms of the disease target, and we understand the milestones that need to be overcome to become a medicine – drug discovery, formulation, toxicology, clinical trial design, regulators, business models.”

Already his team has identified eight projects across the three universities to receive Apollo funding. The first to be backed came out of a 20-year search by Dr Ravi Mahadeva at Cambridge’s Department of Medicine for a small molecule drug to treat Alpha-1 trypsin deficiency (AATD). AAT is a protein that normally protects the lungs. In AATD, a single genetic mutation causes it to aggregate in the liver and the resulting effects on the liver and lungs are disabling and ultimately fatal. There is currently no effective long-term treatment for the disease.

“Ravi came to us with an idea and some early compounds,” says Butt. “Quite simply, it wouldn’t have been picked up by a drug company based on the package that he had. We knew we could design a work package to generate more potent, more selective and more drug-like compounds, and create a package of data that pharma would find attractive.”

For Professor Randall Johnson, Apollo funds have meant that his research in Cambridge’s Department of Physiology, Development and Neuroscience has continued seamlessly through to a drug development programme without the stop-start of waiting for funding, licensing or forming a spin-out. “Randall was one of the first Cambridge academics I saw,” says Butt. “He was excited because he was about to publish a key publication on his genuinely novel work highly relevant to the emerging immune-oncology field. Before Randall’s Nature paper was published, we were already working on a project plan and made the commitment to collaborate on the project.

“Because we are embedded in the University and work closely with Cambridge Enterprise, we have fully confidential access to talk to any academic at any of the three universities. When we worked in pharma, it could take months simply to sit around a table and talk about science and look at data with academics.”

Further down the line, potential therapeutics developed from any of the Apollo-funded programmes will first be offered for licensing to AZ, GSK and Johnson & Johnson, and then more widely; the capital gain of any licensing agreements will be divided between the three universities and the three pharma investors. And the interaction with the companies is not just transactional. Each of them is also committing time, resources and expertise to help the projects that are approved for collaboration.

“The cost to license from us will be much lower than the sum cost to have done all that research internally,” says Tomlinson. “At a time when all the pharmas are cutting their costs and doing less R&D, this provides a different model that will be cost-effective to add potential drugs to their pipelines.

“There are very few totally new drugs every year. To get one of those, you’ve got to cast the net very wide and do everything you can to make the most of the opportunities.

“Apollo has the advantage of not being pigeonholed into working only on one disease or therapy area or limited by drug modality, as we would be if we were a pharma company. As a result, we don’t have to consider a ‘strategic fit’ – we’re simply following the best translatable science that should result in a higher success in getting new medicines to patients.”

Inset image: Read more about research on future therapeutics in Research Horizons magazine. 

Staff at the Botanic Garden are asking Friends and visitors to help name the new arrival.

Director Beverley Glover said: “We are delighted to announce that we have yet another Titan Arum plant preparing to flower – we think, within the next week! This will be the third flowering of a Titan Arum here at the Garden. Visitors may remember our ‘Tiny’ titan flower back in 2015. The Titan plant about to flower is our other plant that last flowered in 2004 and we are asking our visitors to help name our new arrival!”

The Garden will be setting up a Twitter poll asking followers to vote for their favourite name from a shortlist of four: Yoda (as the plant is currently small and green and will display something resembling a lightsaber as it heats up); Arnie (‘I’ll be Back…’); Morph and Titus (both from the plant’s Latin name Amorphophallus titanum). 

Added Glover: “Our last Titan was aptly named ‘Tiny’ as it took us by surprise by flowering from a very small tuber – usually flowers only arise once the plant’s tuber weighs over 15kg. The plant about to flower is similar in weight but we are anticipating a larger flower because measurements are suggesting it’s going to be big. We’ve come up with a straw poll of names chosen by staff and we’d love our visitors to have the final say."

Native to Sumatra in Indonesia, the Titan Arum, (Amorphophallus titanum), produces one of the largest single flowering structures in the world. Also known as the corpse flower, it has the ability to self-generate heat by a process known as thermogenesis. It heats up on the first night of full flowering to produce a stench of rotting flesh that in the wild attracts carrion beetle pollinators over vast distances. The flowering structure lasts 2-3 days only.

“The Titan Arum is a fascinating plant to see in flower and flowering only really happens about once every decade, so it will be around another ten years before we witness this smelly spectacle again at the Garden," said Glover. "We really want to encourage people to take this opportunity to come and see this wonder of the plant world. We’re delighted to share this exciting moment with as many people who want to come and witness it as possible and we will keep the Garden open late on the two nights it chooses to flower."

Horticultural staff in the Garden realised the new bud on the Titan plant was in fact a flower, not a leaf, just a week ago.

The flowering structure currently consists of an upright, creamy, spike-like spadix, embraced by a frilly, pale green spathe which is a highly modified leaf that forms a protective chamber around the ‘proper’ flowers which are clustered at the base of the spadix. The frilly spathe turns blood red on flowering and this is when the spadix starts to heat up and releases strong smelling sulphurous compounds to attract the pollinators and lure them to the clusters of true flowers at the base of the spadix.

In the wild, it is understood that carrion beetles pollinate the plant with pollen from another Titan Arum plant. Pollination of female flowers clustered in rings at the base of the spadix occurs as the insects search for what they believe to be rotting meat. On the second day, the stench begins to fade and the plant’s male flowers open to release pollen onto the beetles as they depart, having searched in vain for a flesh feast. On the third day, the spathe closes up and eventually the spadix collapses.

Glover said: “The Titan Arum has a limited natural distribution, but with increasing habitat loss due to deforestation and habitat degradation, it is categorized as a vulnerable species by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature. As a Botanic Garden, one of our key roles is conserving plants and caring for rare plants such as the Titan so that we can share our understanding of them and help as many people as possible to learn about these amazing plants.

“We’d love to be able to produce and nurture fruit and seed – to grow baby Titans from this plant. This is a tricky task but we have frozen pollen from ‘Tiny’ and we’ve also put out a call to other Botanic Gardens worldwide to see if they have fresh, younger pollen so that we can cross pollinate. Chicago Botanic Garden recently had Titan twins so we hope to receive some pollen from them as well as from the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh. Rarely does this plant fruit in cultivation and we’d love to play our part in conserving this tropical giant.”

The Titan Arum is a difficult species to grow. It is demanding in its cultivation requirements, and generally unpredictable in flowering. It requires a high temperature along with high humidity to flourish, and also sufficient space to develop a large tuber, and in which to accommodate the flower. Considerable horticultural skill and knowledge is required to nurture this species from dormancy to flower.

Daily measurements will be tweeted from the Garden’s Twitter feed @CUBotanicGarden and a live web cam feed will be available from the Garden’s website www.botanic.cam.ac.uk so #ReturnOfTheTitan followers can watch the flower unfold.

Cancer is caused by a combination of inherited genetic faults and environmental factors. While many hundreds of genetic mutations each increase an individual’s risk by a small amount, faults in two particular genes – BRCA1 and BRCA2 – are known to greatly elevate the risk of breast and ovarian cancers.

The clinical management of women with faults in the BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes requires accurate estimates of their risk of developing breast cancer and how this changes with age.  These can be used to estimate how prevention strategies such as medication, surgery and changing lifestyle factors reduce a woman’s risk, and can assist with decisions about the age to commence cancer screening, hence enabling better-informed decision-making.

Almost all previous reports on cancer risks for BRCA1 and BRCA2 mutation carriers have been based on ‘retrospective’ studies – looking at women who had already developed cancer – and estimates are therefore susceptible to biases associated with such study designs, for example inaccuracies in family history reporting and assessment in women born many decades previously (when breast cancer incidence was much lower) that are not relevant to today’s women.

Prospective cohort studies, in which scientists recruit and follow over time carriers of the mutations who have not yet developed breast cancer, overcome these issues. But the prospective studies of women with the BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes published to date have been very small, with the largest based on just 64 incident breast cancers. 

Now, in a study published in JAMA: The Journal of the American Medical Association, an international team of researchers led by the University of Cambridge, UK, has recruited almost 10,000 mutation carriers for a prospective cohort study. This enabled the team to estimate more precisely the breast and ovarian cancer risks for women with faults in BRCA1 and BRCA2.  

“We have been able to provide the most precise estimates of age-specific risks to date,” says the study’s lead author, Dr Antonis Antoniou from the Department of Public Health and Primary Care at the University of Cambridge. “These should provide more confidence in the counselling and clinical management of women with faults in the BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes.”

The researchers found that 72% of women carrying a faulty BRCA1 gene will develop breast cancer risk and 44% will develop ovarian cancer by age 80. Similarly, they found that 69% of women carrying a faulty BRCA2 gene will develop breast cancer and 17% will develop ovarian cancer by age 80. However, for both cancers, a woman’s family history affected the risk – in other words, if a woman’s relative had had a breast cancer diagnosis, then her own risk would be higher than that of a carrier with no family history.

The researchers also found that the position of the specific fault within the gene affected the cancer risk. Mutations in genes occur when the ‘letters’ of DNA – A, C, G and T – get ‘mistyped’ and replaced with a different letter.

“The results show clearly and for the first time in a prospective study, that the cancer risks for women with faults in BRCA1 and BRCA2 depend both on the precise mutation and the woman’s family cancer history,” says Professor Douglas Easton, also from Cambridge and principal investigator of the UK-based EMBRACE study, the largest national cohort of women with mutations that contributed to the study.

Advances in sequencing technologies have opened up the potential of screening all women for BRCA1 and BRCA2 mutations, rather than just those with a significant family history of cancer, as is currently the case in the UK and most other countries. Such population-based screening, however, depends on having reliable estimates of risk to provide to women with and without a family history.

“Now that we understand more clearly the risks faced by women who carry these genetic faults, we should be in a better position to counsel them about the outcomes from screening and prevention programmes,” says Professor Gareth Evans, Consultant in Medical Genetics and co-author from University of Manchester.

“This will also have practical implications on clinical management decisions, for example on the timing of surgery in order to reduce cancer risk. Such decisions tend to be taken around childbearing age, but some women with lower risks may opt to delay surgery until they complete their families.”

The cancer risk estimates obtained by the present study were made possible because of over two decades of investment from Cancer Research UK, the European Union and other funders in establishing and following the cohorts.

Professor Arnie Purushotham, Cancer Research UK’s senior clinical adviser, said: “Women who carry faulty BRCA genes are much more likely to develop breast or ovarian cancers, and this large study could help women and their doctors better understand their risk of developing these cancers.

“This information – combining family medical history and the specific position of the faults in the BRCA genes – could help women decide the steps that they may want to take to reduce their risk of breast cancer, such as preventative surgery, medication or lifestyle changes.”

Reference
Kuchenbaecker, KB et al. Risks of Breast, Ovarian, and Contralateral Breast Cancer for BRCA1 and BRCA2 Mutation Carriers. JAMA; 20 June 2017; DOI: 10.1001/jama.2017.7112

Their microbial quarry gives Dr Trevor Lawley and Professor Gordon Dougan an interesting take on the world and human interaction. When we meet at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, where they both lead research groups, we shake hands. For me, it’s a social norm; for them, it’s a chance to swap bugs.

“When we shook hands, you probably got some of my spores and I got some of yours. It’s a form of kinship that we are just starting to understand,” says Lawley. “When we think about spreading bugs, we often focus on pathogens and disease. The truth is, pathogens are a tiny proportion of the whole community of diverse microorganisms that are on and within us and there’s probably an element of spreading health through this microbiome.”

The microorganisms live on our skin, up our noses and – in particularly large numbers – in our gut. The average human intestine harbours some 100 trillion bacteria from 1,000 species. They have around three million genes and make up 3% of our body weight. “We’re coated with microorganisms – bacteria, viruses, fungi – they outnumber human cells by at least three to one, so we’re more microbial than eukaryotic,” he explains.

So what are they all doing there? Although much remains a mystery, we know that changes in the microbiome appear to be linked with health and disease. They produce vitamins we cannot make ourselves and break down food to extract essential nutrients; and they help our immune systems develop and defend us against harmful bugs.

It seems that as well as being a community, our microbiome is also like an organ or tissue. “Some 30–40% of metabolites in our blood come from microbes in the intestine, so lots of our physiology and wellbeing is probably driven by factors in the gut that we don’t fully appreciate,” says Dougan, who holds a Chair in Cambridge’s Department of Medicine. “But we’re starting to realise that several human diseases are caused by pathological imbalances in these microbial communities, and that genetics, diet, antibiotics and infections can create these imbalances.”

The idea that our microbiome contributes to our health is not new. In 1908, the Russian microbiologist Ilya Mechnikov won a Nobel Prize for his discovery of phagocytes. He also sought to nurture his microbiota by consuming copious quantities of fermented milk, having noticed the longevity of yoghurt-loving Bulgarians.

Since then, the microbiome has been implicated in many areas of health and disease. “Evidence is accumulating that our microbiota can protect us against infection and inflammatory diseases of the bowel, influence factors such as obesity, and that bad microbiota, such as Clostridium difficile, can damage us,” Dougan explains. C. diff is a key part of this story. First described in the 1930s, C. diff lives in the gut of around 3% of healthy adults and, kept in check by a healthy microbiota, it does no damage. When antibiotics disrupt the microbiota, however, C. diff can be life threatening, especially among frail, elderly adults in hospitals and care homes.

In such circumstances what works best is not more antibiotics, but reintroducing gut bugs from healthy volunteers via faecal transplants. While not the most marketable of treatments, its astonishing success led Lawley and Dougan to believe that the microbiome could be an important therapeutic target.

“When I started training in Gordon’s lab ten years ago, we realised that faecal transplants could cure 90% of people with C. diff who had failed standard antibiotic treatment,” says Lawley. “That’s when we started to think that if we could identify the good bugs, we could make a medicine.”

Unfortunately, identifying the good bugs is harder than it sounds and for many years researchers lacked the necessary tools to culture them, characterise them and chart their modes of action.

Three recent advances changed all that. Genomics has helped us understand the microbiome as a whole. In 2003, scientists at Stanford University sequenced the gut microbiome (the collective genomes of all resident microorganisms) of healthy human volunteers for the first time, and 2008 saw the establishment of the Human Microbiome Project (a United States National Institutes of Health initiative). Then, germ-free mice provided researchers with a model system to test their ideas. Finally, Lawley discovered a way of growing gut bacteria in the lab – something that for decades was thought impossible.

“One of the things we had to overcome – a dogma as well as a technical barrier – was to culture the unculturable,” he says. “Now, we are culturing at scale and sequencing. This means we have access to the bugs to follow up and work out what they do, and then even to make a medicine from.”

Buoyed by their success, the Sanger Institute last year spun out a new company – Microbiotica – to exploit their unique capabilities in microbiome science, particularly in culture collection, genome database and animal models, to develop new medicines.

“We’re collecting samples of poo from around the world – from Vietnam and India to Nigeria and Kenya – to build a globally representative collection of microbiome bacteria. No-one else has such a large and diverse collection,” Dougan says. “It will allow us to mine these isolates – and their genomes – for new antibiotics and design new bacterial-based therapies.”

As well as finding a more palatable alternative to faecal transplants for C. diff infections, Lawley and Dougan have their sights set on using bugs as drugs in other areas. There is strong evidence that both inflammatory bowel disease (which affects around 0.5% of the population) and irritable bowel syndrome (which affects 15–20%) result from a damaged microbiome, so these conditions are prime candidates.

Lawley and Dougan are also working with Imperial College London to study links between the lung microbiome and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and asthma, as well as the microbiome differences of babies born by C-section versus vaginal delivery. They are also working with American collaborators on the bladder, where the hallmark of a healthy microbiome is very different to that of the gut.

“In the gut, the signature of health is diverse microbes. In the vagina and the bladder, it’s the opposite – simplified is healthy. Once they become diverse, there’s something wrong,” explains Lawley, who is also Chief Scientific Officer at Microbiotica.

The researchers are also working on some cancers for which modern immunotherapies are successful against the disease but cannot be used in some patients because they damage the microbiome so badly. “We’re involved in MelResist, a multi-university collaboration on new therapies for melanoma. Long-term survival in melanoma patients treated with antibody therapies is now a remarkable 50%,” says Lawley. “But if they have two different antibodies, they can develop life-threatening diarrhoea and colitis and have to stop treatment – we think there’s a microbiome element there.”

It’s a far cry from Bulgarian yoghurt, and while there’s much science yet to be done, and many regulatory challenges to bring an entirely new kind of medicine to market, it’s a challenge they relish. “We want to innovate and encourage links and partnerships with other organisations,” Dougan concludes. “It’s a whole new science – but we’re confident that we can deliver new medicines.”

Inset images: Trevor Lawley (left) and Gordon Dougan; credit: Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute.

Read more about research on future therapeutics in Research Horizons magazine. 

Adair Turner, Baron Turner of Echiswell, received the degree of Doctor of Law for his services to the State. The businessman, academic and former Chairman of the Financial Services Authority was described in the Oration as “the answer to every crisis in public policy”. An alum of Gonville & Caius College, Lord Turner is currently Chairman of the board of Governors at the Institute for New Economic Thinking.

Presenting him for his Honorary Degree, the Orator said: “In the present climate…. when knowledge itself is too often derided let us say this: there stands before us a man of impeccable political neutrality, of intellectual rigour, of the soundest judgement, to whom, for his many services to the State, we now give particular thanks.”

Also recognised with a Doctor of Law degreefor his services to the State was Professor Sir Malcolm Grant, former Pro-Vice-Chancellor at the University of Cambridge. Professor Grant, who was Provost and President of University College London, was appointed the founding chairman of NHS England, with responsibility for investing the budget of the NHS in England and for its operational performance –a role to which he was recently re-appointed.

Professor Jean-Marie Lehn, Professor of Supramolecular Chemistry at the Collège de France, was awarded the title of Doctor of Science. In 1987, Professor Lehn won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry with Donald Cram and Charles Pederson for their innovative work on synthesising cryptands, the molecules that bind atoms together.

Formerly a postdoctoral fellow at Jesus College, Professor Eric Maskin received the degree of Doctor of Science for his contributions to game theory, contract theory, and social choice theory. Currently the Adams University Professor at Harvard University, in 2007 he won the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics with Leonid Hurwicz and Roger Myerson for laying the foundations of mechanism design theory –the field in economics and game theory that takes an engineering approach to designing economic mechanisms or incentives. “Other economists study what happens when certain rules have been established in some business or other,” his citation reads; “he engineers the rules which will produce the desired outcomes.”

Also awarded the degree of Doctor of Science was Professor Janet Rossant, an alumna and Honorary Fellow of Darwin College, whose research has helped to uncover the cellular and molecular events that control early-stage embryo development in mice, with implications for stem cell biology and understanding developmental disorders. A contributor to ethical and policy debates around stem cell research, she is currently a Senior Scientist at The Hospital for Sick Children, in Toronto.

“She has taken cells from the placenta,” reads Professor Rossant’s citation, “and restored to them the miraculous, protean power of transformation by which they can grow into any tissue—bone, say, or muscle, or white marrow; and so she has opened up a new source of stem cells, which can be exploited without harm to the embryo.”

Dame Stephanie Shirley, awarded the title of Doctor of Science, arrived in Britain on a Kindertransport at the age of five, an exile from Vienna fleeing the Nazi terror. An Honorary Fellow of Murray Edwards College, she is an information technologist, entrepreneur and philanthropist, who throughout her career has pioneered opportunities for the education and professional development of women and girls. In later years she has also developed a major philanthropic role through the Shirley Foundation, particularly supporting autism research and emerging technology. “I do it because of my personal history,” she has said. “I need to justify the fact that my life was saved. Now it is my turn to help others.”

Computer scientists and software engineer Sophie Wilson was made Doctor of Science. After studying mathematics and computer science at Selwyn College, of which she is an Honorary Fellow, she went on to make significant contributions to computer development, including one of the first Acorn microcomputers and, later, the BBC Micro. “There are now four of the chips that she designed for every human being on earth,” the citation reads. “Let us greet, therefore, a woman who helped to plant an acorn and pave a fen with silicon.”

Professor Manuel Castells, a Spanish sociologist and Honorary Fellow of St John’s College, was awarded the title of Doctor of Arts. Best known for his trilogy of books about the information society, published under the title The Information Age, he currently holds the Wallis Annenberg Chair in Communication at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles. “Llike the astronomer who looks up at the night sky and ponders the heavens,” reads Professor Castell's citation, “all the world is made his observatory and his laboratory. And he steers clear of ‘the dubious ventures of futurology’; it is enough, he says, if what he has written relates to our experience.”

BIOGRAPHIES

Malcolm Grant

Malcolm Grant is an Honorary Fellow of Clare College and a former Professor of Land Economy and Pro-Vice-Chancellor. After reading law at the University of Otago, a lectureship at Southampton and a professorial post at University College London, he took up his Cambridge chair and Clare fellowship in 1991. He then returned to UCL as President and Provost 2003-13. A barrister and public servant as well as an academic, he has chaired various public bodies including the Local Government Commission for England. In 2011 he was appointed the founding chairman of NHS England, with responsibility for investing the budget of the NHS in England and for its operational performance. A specialist in property, planning and environmental law, he is a Bencher of the Middle Temple, an Honorary Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians, Honorary Life Member of the Royal Town Planning Institute, Honorary Member of The Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors and a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences. Chancellor of the University of York and President of the Council for At-Risk Academics (CARA), Sir Malcolm was appointed Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire in 2003 and knighted in 2013.

Adair, Baron Turner of Ecchinswell

Adair Turner read history and economics at Gonville and Caius College, of which he is a former College Supervisor in Economics and now an Honorary Fellow. The 2012 Rede Lecturer, as an undergraduate he was President of the Cambridge Union Society and Chairman of the Cambridge University Conservative Association. Lord Turner began his business career with BP and then the Chase Manhattan Bank, before moving to McKinsey & Co., of which he became a director in 1994. Director General of the CBI 1995-9 and later Vice-Chairman of Merrill Lynch Europe, he served as Chairman of the Financial Services Authority 2008-13 and of the Committee on Climate Change 2008-12. A former Chair of the Economic and Social Research Council, he chairs the Institute for New Economic Thinking. Having combined a business career with academic work, he holds visiting chairs at a number of institutions, including the London School of Economics. A Trustee of the British Museum and an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Societies of London and Edinburgh, Adair Turner was created a life peer in 2005.

Jean-Marie Lehn

Jean-Marie Lehn is a former Alexander Todd Visiting Professor of Chemistry. He considered studying philosophy before reading physical, chemical and natural sciences at the University of Strasbourg and completing a PhD in organic chemistry in 1963. At Harvard he did post-doctoral work on the total synthesis of vitamin B12 whilst also studying quantum mechanics. Returning to Strasbourg he was appointed assistant professor in 1966 and then Professor of Chemistry at the Université Louis Pasteur until his election to the Chair in Chemistry at the Collège de France, Paris, in 1979. In nearly one thousand papers, Professor Lehn has made major contributions in the areas of supramolecular chemistry, physical chemistry and photochemistry. Now an Honorary Professor at the Collège de France, he is also an Emeritus Professor and a Professor in the Institute for Advanced Study at Strasbourg. A Foreign Member of the Royal Society, Jean-Marie Lehn is a Chevalier, Ordre des Palmes Académiques, Officier, Ordre National du Mérite and Grand Officier, Ordre National de la Légion d’Honneur. In 1987, with Donald Cram and Charles Pederson, he received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry.

Eric Maskin

Eric Maskin read mathematics at Harvard University, completing his PhD there in 1976 but spending time as a visiting student at Darwin College. A former Research and now Honorary Fellow of Jesus College, he is also an Honorary Fellow of St John’s College and a former Overseas Fellow of Churchill College. After a post-doctoral year in Cambridge, he was appointed an assistant professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and was later a professor there before returning to Harvard as Louis Berkman Professor of Economics in 1985. In 2000, he moved to the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, but rejoined Harvard in 2012 as Adams University Professor. His work has covered topics from mechanism design theory, with applications to climate change and election methods, to game theory and political economy. A member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, former President of the Econometric Society and Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy, Eric Maskin has received the Jean-Jacques Laffont Prize and Harvard’s Centennial Medal. With Leonid Hurwicz and Roger Myerson, he was awarded the 2007 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics.

Janet Rossant

Janet Rossant read zoology at Oxford, before coming to Darwin College, of which she is an Honorary Fellow, to complete a PhD in 1976. A developmental biologist, her first post was at Brock University in Canada, later moving to Toronto and the Mount Sinai Hospital in 1985 and then the Hospital for Sick Children in 2005. She is currently a University Professor in the Department of Molecular Genetics at the University of Toronto and President and Scientific Director of the Gairdner Foundation, having received the Gairdner Wightman Award in 2015. Her research has helped to uncover the cellular and molecular events that control early-stage embryo development in mice, with implications for stem cell biology and understanding developmental disorders. A contributor to ethical and policy debates and former President of the International Society for Stem Cell Research, she is a Senior Scientist at The Hospital for Sick Children. Winner of many awards, Janet Rossant is a Fellow of the Royal Societies of London and Canada, a Foreign Associate of the National Academy of Sciences USA and since 2015 a Companion of the Order of Canada.

Stephanie Shirley

Stephanie ‘Steve’ Shirley is an Honorary Fellow of Murray Edwards College. An information technologist, entrepreneur and philanthropist, she arrived in Britain as a child refugee and her initial work with computers was with the Post Office Research Station and a subsidiary of ICL. In 1962 she founded her own software company, Freelance Programmers, later Xansa and subsequently acquired by Steria. This evolved a unique business model for the industry, outsourcing software development to women working from home. Originally targeting women with dependents, throughout her career she has pioneered opportunities for the education and professional development of women and girls. In later years she has also developed a major philanthropic role through the Shirley Foundation, particularly supporting autism research and emerging technology. A former President of the British Computer Society and Master of the Worshipful Company of Information Technologists, Dame Stephanie has also served as UK Ambassador for Philanthropy. A Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering and Mountbatten Medallist, she was appointed an Officer of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire in 1980 and a Dame Commander in 2000.

Sophie Wilson

Sophie Wilson read computer science at Selwyn College, of which she is an Honorary Fellow. Senior Technical Director and Fellow at Broadcom, as an undergraduate she developed what would form Acorn System 1, a microcomputer that was Acorn’s first product. In 1981, the BBC commissioned her to design a more advanced microcomputer, the BBC Micro, which allowed schools across the UK to introduce children to writing their own software and for which she designed and wrote BBC BASIC. In 1985 she co-created the Acorn RISC Machine Processor, now an integral part of items such as smartphones and broadband routers. Used in Apple’s first personal assistant, Newton, Apple products still feature it today. A Fellow of the Royal Society, in 2016 she received (with Steve Furber) the Mullard Medal for their contribution to the design and analysis of the ARM Processor as the most successful embedded processor architecture in the world. A Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering and the British Computer Society, Sophie Wilson has Fellowship of the Computer History Museum for innovation in programming and processor architecture.

Manuel Castells

Manuel Castells is an Honorary Fellow of St John’s College and Director of Research in the Department of Sociology. He was born in Spain and studied in Paris. Professor of Sociology and Planning, University of California at Berkeley for 24 years, he is currently University Professor and the Wallis Annenberg Chair in Communication at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles. He has published 30 books, including his trilogy “The Information Age: Economy, Culture, and Society”, translated into 22 languages. He is a Fellow of the British Academy, of the Academia Europaea, of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, and of the Spanish Royal Academy of Economics. He was a founding board member of the European Research Council. He has received the Erasmus Medal, the Holberg Prize and the Balzan Prize and has been knighted by the Governments of France, Portugal, Catalonia, Finland, and Chile.