Programmes to unpick disease pathways

19 August 2009

A selection of Wellcome Trust grants made recently through the Molecules, Genes and Cells funding stream.

A programme grant has been awarded to Professor Helen Saibil at Birkbeck, University of London. She studies the role of chaperone proteins in protein folding and unfolding, and will now build on a new approach of cryo-electron microscopy of frozen cell sections to study the three-dimensional structure of yeast prions. This method could one day be applied to studying neurodegenerative diseases in animal models.

At University College London, Professor Tony Segal has been awarded a programme grant to investigate his hypothesis that Crohn's disease is caused by a failure - rather than an overreaction - of a person's immune system. If the biological pathways involved can be uncovered, then researchers could potentially develop therapies to treat inflammatory bowel diseases, which affect around 1 in 500 of the UK population.

Image: Molecular models of two different states of the apical domain of the chaperonin protein Gro EL. Credit: Helen Saibil, Wellcome Images