Healthcare Science Websites

For anyone who is currently studying Healthcare Science with us (or elsewhere) or for anyone thinking about doing so, this website and a blog post by our own Vice Chancellor have recently been put together and are well worth a look for further information both about the roles of Healthcare Scientists and the role of Universities in training them.

For more information about our Life Sciences and Physiological Sciences degree programs, see our course pages:

Life Sciences
Physiological Sciences

Or the previous blog entry on our courses.

The Plymouth Student Scientist

While we are on the subject of dissertation projects, you can see a selection of the best projects and literature reviews from our students (and from other departments in the Faculty of Science and Technology) at The Plymouth Student Scientist. This online journal showcases the work of our students and will give you an idea of the types of research projects that we offer to our students. You can read through examples from the past 5 years on the archives page.

Final year poster session

The last act for our final year students is to present their dissertation projects in the form of a poster to staff. Yesterday saw the annual poster session (see the photos below). Just a quick note to wish all of our final year students good luck in their future careers and to say how much the staff have enjoyed teaching you all!

School of Biomedical and Biological sciences to restructure

Exciting news this month from the school - it will form two new schools at the University from 1st August 2013.

School of Biomedical and Healthcare Science (In the new faculty of Medicine, Biomedicine and Dentistry) -

Head of School, Prof Neil Avent

School of Biological Sciences (In the new faculty of Science & Environment)

Head of School (To be announced)

The new school of Biomedical & Healthcare science will offer exciting new opportunities to study alongside medical and dental students, and a new health science campus at Derriford is being planned to relocate our research labs there. Our long term objectives will be to encourage our Biomedicine, Healthcare science and Human Bioscience graduates to study graduate entry medicine, a higher research degree, or career progression in the NHS or Industry. Further updates will be posted on this Blog as the school develops.

Neil Avent 150513



Eternal War in the Dark Matter of our Genome

Something out of Star Wars perhaps? Not even close - Dr Robert Belshaw, one of our new appointments in the department gives an overview of his research:

"The proteins that make up our body are coded for by less than 2% of our genome sequence. Finding out what goes on in other 98% (the so-called "Dark Matter") is one of the great challenges in genomic research.

Some of this Dark Matter is made up of regulatory elements (signals to switch our genes on and off) and the ENCODE project (Encyclopedia of DNA Elements) is a big collaborative attempt to make sense of this. Other regions may be just "junk" DNA with no function, but around half of the Dark Matter is the remains of genomic parasites: pieces of DNA that copy themselves to new locations, often causing damage as they do so. Our body has a battery of defence mechanisms to fight this proliferation, which parallels the way our immune system copes with ordinary pathogens.

I have just moved to Plymouth from Oxford where I was working on a group of these genomic parasites, called endogenous retroviruses. There is a BBC report on a paper we did last year on them. One aspect of my research at Plymouth will be to investigate the possible benefits of these viruses. They are generally silenced (switched off) in our body but this control breaks down with disease, leading to viral proteins being produced in cancerous and infected cells. In theory we can stimulate our immune system to attack these cells, opening up the possibility of new treatments for cancer and HIV infection, even vaccines."

See more information and publications on Robert's web site

Human Health Sciences Brochure

Finally worked out to get files displayed on this blog - have a look at the brochure for our courses or download it.

Human Health Brochure

Systems Biology Facility

Thanks to a substantial investment in post-genomic technologies, our Systems Biology Facility is now up and running. These purpose-built labs allow us to use next generation sequencing technology and proteomics to study disease.

Lots of machines that go ping

Visit the Facility web page for lots more pictures of machines that go ping (as well as doing lots of other impressive stuff that the author of these pages pretends to understand).