***We look forward to welcoming Ilya Burkov MSc Nanomedicine, BEng Medical Engineering, who was recently awarded the Adrian J Crisp PhD studentship. Ilya joins us from Swansea where he has been studying cellular mediators in osteoarthritis. Information on the studentship is available here . ***We look forward to welcoming Dr Toni Rikkonen PhD as visiting Research associate from February 2014, working on muscle responses to exercise in older adults.***
Research in the bone group focuses on osteoporotic fragility fractures and osteoarthritis by examining bone structure, shape and biology in health and disease. With scientists from the University Engineering for Clinical Practice initiative, we pioneered a way of assessing the 3D structure and shape of cortical bone structure in life called Cortical Bone Mapping (CBM). We have used CBM to identify patches of focal osteoporosis in the femurs of women with hip fracture, and discovered that 1-34 parathyroid hormone therapy in severely osteoporotic women makes the femoral cortex thicker in key areas at risk of fracture. We recently discovered that cortical thickness and mass increased at critical locations in osteoporotic women treated with anti-RANK ligand antibody injections. Within the Department of Medicine, we represent the Division of Rheumatology and within Cambridge NIHR Biomedical Research Centre we represent the ‘Metabolism, Endocrinology and Bone‘ theme.
Our HTA licenced laboratory offers a full in-house histomorphometry service for the investigation of bone diseases, under the direction of Dr Linda Skingle. We specialise in hard tissue histomorphometry, embedding samples in LR white resin, applying various stains and then using Surveyor & Bioquant software for quantification purposes. Our long standing collaboration with local experts Objective Imaging has recently lead to our installation of an Oasis glide scanning stage to our Nikon Eclipse E800 microscope.
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