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Asked by loading........... to Thomas, Ellen, Elliot, Hazel, Rupesh on 14 Jun 2016. This question was also asked by Princess, graceeee17, 422bsmf22, *Holly*.
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Thomas Biggans answered on 14 Jun 2016:
One thing I’ve come across during my work is watching how a patient’s brain adapts to injury. Our brain scans show which areas of the brain are working and which areas are not. We can ask patients to carry out tasks while they’re being scanned like tapping their fingers and the part of the brain that controls finger tapping will show up on the scan. If this part gets damaged then the task can be split between two other parts of the brain which both work together to complete the task. We can see how the body adapts to continue as best it in can and try to come up with a way to help it.
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Elliot Jokl answered on 14 Jun 2016:
I’m looking at how muscles grow, and we are getting a better understanding of how important recycling is in your muscles. When you use your muscles, molecules in your muscle will sometimes bend out of shape or break, and so it is important that these are cleared away and new molecules are made to replace them.
If this recycling process isn’t working very well, it can make your muscles very weak and diseased.
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Hazel Garvie-Cook answered on 16 Jun 2016:
In my PhD, I worked on drug delivery to the skin and I researched the best ways of delivering vaccines into people’s bodies. Generally vaccines are delivered using a needle – the drug molecule is injected straight under the skin and that way it gets into our bodies and we have an immune response to it.
The skin actually has a very efficient immune response though. Bypassing the skin using a needle means that we miss out on this. The most successful vaccine ever delivered, the small pox vaccine, was delivered into the top surfaces of the skin using small scratches (instead of a needle), to trigger the skin’s good immune response.
Lots of work is currently underway to try to find other ways of delivering vaccines to make the most of our skin’s immune response. It would also be better to have methods of delivering vaccines without using needles, as needles can get contaminated. If you’re interested in finding out more, have a google of microneedle patches (they look quite brutal but are actually painless!). I think they’re really neat devices.
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