MRC Centre for Reproductive Health

Reproduction is a fundamental feature of all life, essential for the continuation of our species. The birth of a healthy baby represents the culmination of a remarkable series of events and a defining moment in our progress towards ?living a long and healthy life?. The reproductive tissues that provide the platform for our fertility and nurture a successful pregnancy are characterised by their remarkable ?resilience? ? namely their ability to withstand or recover quickly from ?challenges? that might otherwise have an adverse impact on their function. Other tissues cannot usually show such resilience. Our new Centre will link scientists studying the ways in which reproductive tissues regenerate, repair and renew themselves enabling them to withstand the impacts of our modern lifestyle including stress and obesity, with teams of doctors and scientists who are focusing their research on stem cell biology, tissue regeneration, inflammation and fetal growth in the brain, liver, lung and kidney. This multidisciplinary approach will ensure we can apply our research findings to the development of new therapies for common reproductive problems such as infertility, heavy periods, premature birth, low birth weight, but also that they are applied towards therapies for diseases that affect the liver, brain, lung and vascular system such as cirrhosis and cancer. Crucially, we will train the next generation of basic and clinician scientists in reproductive medicine and its broader exploitation and communicate our new and exciting research findings to the general public, through our public lecture and schools outreach programmes.

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 Resilience (CRR) 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. We specifically request funding to establish a new 4 year PhD training programme and for a postdoctoral fellowship for capacity building in this innovative area of medicine.