The interfascicular matrix niche - novel approaches to identify the aetiology of tendinopathy

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Tendon injuries (tendinopathies) are increasingly common, highly debilitating and recalcitrant. Tendinopathy is cell driven in response to overload, so successful development of pharmaceutical treatments must first establish the mechanotransduction pathways driving disease, to identify likely targets. This project utilises organ-on-a-chip approaches to enable a first detailed exploration into the mechanobiology of specific tendon cell sub-populations, investigating cell interplay, to identify the pathways driving tendon injury.This project will be carried out in the groups of Professors Hazel Screen and Martin Knight at QMUL, in collaboration with Dr Graham Riley at the University of East Anglia. The successful candidate will be working within our new QM-Emulate Organs-on-chips centre with extensive cell culture facilities and supported by a multidisciplinary team of post docs and PhD students. We will carry out the first phenotyping of the tendon cell populations, in addition to establishing the first tendon-on-a-chip co-culture model for exploring physiology and pathology.