Our newly refurbished laboratories will help us to better understand what is happening in response to brain injury, putting us in a better position to treat the patients and improve their long-term outcomes.
- Peter Hutchinson
The John Pickard Neurosurgical Laboratories, based at Addenbrooke’s Hospital, Cambridge University Hospitals, will contain purpose built modern laboratories and updated offices, and are named after John Pickard, Professor Emeritus of Neurosurgery. Pickard was Cambridge’s first Professor of Neurosurgery, who was in post from 1991 until his retirement in 2013. The suite consists of laboratories dedicated to neurochemistry, and imaging and treating brain tumours.
“Injuries to the brain, either through trauma or diseases such as brain tumours, can have serious lasting effects on individuals, as well as for their families and carers,” says Professor Peter Hutchinson, Head of Academic Neurosurgery at the University of Cambridge. “Our newly refurbished laboratories will help us to better understand what is happening in response to this damage, putting us in a better position to treat the patients and improve their long-term outcomes.”
The Neurochemistry Laboratory, led by Dr Keri Carpenter, aims to develop better ways of monitoring and treating brain injury by investigating how the brain responds to injury and how these responses can lead to long-term disabilities. Better treatments are needed to ensure the best outcome for each patient, and alleviate demands on carers, local authorities and NHS resources. The findings are potentially also relevant to diseases such as dementia and Parkinson’s, which often manifest at a younger age in brain injury survivors.
The laboratories will be the leading unit in the UK to use microdialysis, which enables doctors to deliver molecules to and from the injured brain. This technology can be used to monitor, study and potentially treat specific areas of the brain. Researchers at the University have pioneered the use of non-radioactive ‘labels’ administered by microdialysis to track metabolism. Microdialysis is also used to support clinical trials of drugs given intravenously to establish how effectively the drug is able to cross the ‘blood-brain barrier’, transiting from the bloodstream into the brain.
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Image: brain2 (edited)
Credit: Roger Mommaerts
Reproduced courtesy of the University of Cambridge
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