Wed 15 May 13:00: Bradford Hill seminar - Is perfection the enemy of good? Challenges and opportunities for building the evidence-base to inform sexual and reproductive health policy and practice
All are welcome to our next hybrid Bradford Hill Seminar by Prof Cath Mercer of the UCL Institute for Global Health, who will discuss:
‘Is perfection the enemy of good? Challenges and opportunities for building the evidence-base to inform sexual and reproductive health policy and practice’.
This will be a hybrid event
No registration required to attend in person at:
Large Seminar Room, East Forvie Building, Forvie Site, Robinson Way, Cambridge CB2 0SRT .
Registration required to attend online
Please register in Teams in advance at https://rb.gy/4svy5i
About this talk
Poor sexual and reproductive health causes significant morbidity. Last year, nearly 400,000 new sexually transmitted infections were diagnosed in England alone. Additionally, there is increasing awareness of sexual rights, the role of sexual pleasure and wellbeing, and what these mean for a satisfying sex life and our general health and wellbeing.
Yet this critical aspect of our lives is highly sensitive and sometimes stigmatised making sexual behaviour, its drivers and consequences difficult to research. Methods are required that maximise response and minimise bias so that the resulting evidence is of sufficient quality, including for informing policy and practice.
Such methodological rigour is neither cheap nor quick, and since the COVID -19 pandemic shifted expectations around both the timelines for acquiring evidence and the public’s willingness to participate in research, do we need to re-think how we do research in challenging fields such as sexual and reproductive health? Do we need to revise in our definition of what is ‘good enough’?
About Professor Cath Mercer
Cath Mercer is Professor of Sexual Health Science at University College London. A statistician and demographer by training, Cath is internationally recognised as an expert in developing and employing robust methods that advance the scientific study of sexual behaviour, one of the most socially-sensitive disciplines, leading studies that work for – and with – marginalised communities through to the general population, in a variety of settings, employing a range of study designs and research methods.
- Speaker: Professor Cath Mercer, UCL Institute for Global Health
- Wednesday 15 May 2024, 13:00-14:00
- Venue: Large Seminar Room, East Forvie Building, Forvie Site Robinson Way Cambridge CB2 0SR..
- Series: Bradford Hill Seminars; organiser: Paul Browne.
Wed 20 Mar 14:00: Cutting back malaria: CRISPR-based approaches for antimalarial target discovery
The repeated emergence of antimalarial resistance underscores the importance of identifying new drug targets, as well as understanding the genetic architecture of current resistance pathways and any associated fitness costs. We have developed several genomics-based approaches that leverage CRISPR editing of the Plasmodium falciparum genome to validate causal resistance mutations and explore the essentiality and biological function of gene families as antimalarial targets. To more efficiently determine if compounds kill the parasite via known modes-of-action, we have generated a panel of barcoded parasite lines that encompass a wide spectrum of the known Plasmodium resistome, and have miniaturised a compound-screening assay to allow semi-automated liquid handling of parasite cultures. Competitive growth of drug-resistant lines also reveals the fitness cost of resistance. To overcome a bottleneck in evolution of resistance in the lab, we have also developed “mutator” parasite lines with an elevated mutation rate to increase the genetic complexity of parasite cultures. Finally, we are exploring whether non-coding mutations, specifically in lncRNAs, might also contribute to the parasite resistome. Collectively these approaches aim to accelerate the identification and validation of potential new targets, as well as understand the breadth of the parasite response to antimalarial challenge.
- Speaker: Professor Marcus Lee - Biological Chemistry and Drug Discovery, University of Dundee
- Wednesday 20 March 2024, 14:00-15:00
- Venue: Seminar Room, Tennis Court Road, Dept of Pathology..
- Series: Parasitology Seminars; organiser: Anna Protasio.
Thu 18 Apr 14:00: E. coli and the Game of Clones Host – Kate Baker
Escherichia coli is the most studied microbe to date and its genomic and phenotypic evolution has been mapped to a great detail over several decades. However, significant knowledge gaps remain to explain the stable equilibria of clone population frequencies and transient population changes discovered using representative high-resolution genomic surveys. Here we review recent results based on in-depth analysis of the E. coli plasmidome and its importance for understanding the Game of Clones.
Host – Kate Baker
- Speaker: Professor Jukka Corander from Wellcome Sanger Institute, Cambridge and University of Oslo
- Thursday 18 April 2024, 14:00-15:00
- Venue: Biffen Lecture theatre and Zoom.
- Series: Genetics Seminar ; organiser: Caroline Newnham.