Last week Fawziah, Bilge, Natasha, Aeshah and myself attended the Basement Membrane Workshop run by the American Society of Matrix Biology (but hosted in Manchester this time).
This is genuinely my favourite meeting. Every single talk and poster is relevant and interesting to my team. I always come away with a list of experiments and ideas as well as new contacts.
For my students it is brilliant, they get to hear talks and meet all people whose papers they have been reading, citing and being inspired by. Its a great chance to get an overview of the field.
Of course, we were keen to share and get feedback from the work we’ve been doing on LaNts and laminins… cue the obligatory cheesy photos:
Working from Left to right: Fawziah Asiri presented some exciting new work in breast cancer invasion and metastasis with her stunning images of tumour organoids. Next, Bilge Sari presented her work on LaNt a31 in pancreatic cancer. Those images to the bottom right are super cool… she’s using the chicken eggs as a platform to grown tumours in a physiologically relevant setting but without needing animals. The results are stunning in general and the LaNt results even more so…watch this space for an update soon. Second from the right is Aeshah Hasan with her poster on LaNt a31 in the vasculature including some cool images from retinal flat mounts and some images from our transgenic model provided by Conro “Conor” Sugden (who somehow appeared in Fawziah’s picture despite now working for Prof Rachel Lennon). Finally on the far right, Natasha Chavda, looking particularly proud, was showing off her new tools for super-resolution imaging of laminins. I know what you are thinking, our resolution has been pretty super up to now, but trust me, these are super…er.
A great thing about this meeting is that not only is everyone really friendly but also there was plenty of scheduled time for poster viewing and each of the team got lots of comments, suggestions, feedback and guidance on their work.
Two other things that I thought were particularly excellent about this meeting.
On the first day we had round table discussions about the field, each table being led by senior academic but getting input from everyone. I often cringe at these and find them painful but here something about the group of people, the questions being discussed being challenging enough to warrant discussion and being in areas where different backgrounds could contribute, as well as the timing and genuine love of the topic exhibited by everyone made it a really good and enjoyable session and an effective way to meet new people.
Secondly (pic above) we had talks from a patient representative from one of the basement membrane disease groups, Alport syndrome. From a combination of talking about her family experiences of different disease presentations despite the same genetic mutation and showing the trailer for a really inspirational documentary film about a person with Alport syndrome cycling and parachuting their way across Europe whilst dealing physically and emotionally with increasingly bad kidney failure (below).
I always find interacting with patients is both insightful, we learn a lot, and inspirational.
The video below is excellent, take a few minutes to watch it, You won’t be disappointed.
https://www.crowdfunder.co.uk/p/my-only-antidote-film
LaNts and Laminins 