Centre for Reproductive Biomedicine Fellowship Award 2

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Reproduction is a fundamental feature of all life, essential for the continuation of our species. The remarkable integrative biology of human reproductive tissues is responsible for their outstanding resilience, characterised by long-term maintenance of stem cell populations and repeated episodes of regeneration and scarless healing. In Edinburgh there is now an exciting opportunity to understand the fundamental mechanisms responsible for the resilience and repair of reproductive tissues by bringing together, under new leadership and in a new Centre, outstanding strengths in reproductive health and tissue biology, the stem cell niche, resolution and repair of inflammation, developmental programming by steroids, epigenetics, systems and computational biology and tissue and organ imaging. The added value delivered will enable investigators and trainees in the proposed MRC/University of Edinburgh Centre for Reproductive Health (CRH) to address three linked questions of crucial importance in reproductive health and beyond:

[1] What mechanisms deliver the optimal tissue niches for repeated regeneration of reproductive tissues?

[2] How do reproductive tissues normally achieve scarless healing and what goes wrong when this fails?

[3] How is reproductive resilience programmed by developmental effects of steroids?

The proposed research strategy will offer unparalleled opportunities to understand fundamental processes with implications for resilience and repair in many organs. We will exploit this knowledge to develop novel treatments for the major unmet clinical challenges in reproductive health, to exploit this for impacts across medicine and to provide a rich environment for interdisciplinary research training.