Cambridge researchers honoured in 2022 Blavatnik Awards for Young Scientists in the UK for pioneering work
Madeline Lancaster, from the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology, and the University of Cambridge’s Gonçalo Bernardes have been honoured in the 2022 Blavatnik Awards for Young Scientists in the UK.
Madeline will receive £100,000 after being named as a laureate in the life sciences category in recognition of her ground-breaking research into the use of cerebral organoids to investigate human brain development.
And Gonçalo, a professor of chemical biology and fellow of Trinity Hall, will receive £30,000 after being named as a finalist in the chemistry category for research in the area of ‘bench-to-clinic’ bioorthogonal chemistry, which involves the control of tailored chemical reactions that can take place in the body without interfering with natural processes.
The awards, supported by the Blavatnik Family Foundation and independently administered by the New York Academy of Sciences, celebrate the most promising researchers in the life sciences, physical sciences and engineering, and chemistry. One nominee from each category is named a laureate in the UK and two finalists in each category are also recognised.
Madeline, a group leader in the Cell Biology Division of the LMB, said: “This award is a defining moment in my career and I could not have done it without all the hard work and dedication of my team.
“To be recognised in this way is very encouraging and makes me even more excited about the future.”
The organoids used in Madeline’s research are generated from stem cells to allow the modelling of complex, human brain development in vitro. Among the fundamental questions it has helped her group to study is why humans have comparatively large brains compared to other mammalian species. Her lab also researches cellular mechanisms underlying uniquely human neurodevelopmental disorders, such as autism and intellectual disability.
And recently her group has used the organoids to show how the Covid-19 virus SARS-CoV-2 is able to infect brain cells, which could lead to long-term neurological complications.
The awards organisers said Madeline’s technology was “ushering in a new era of neuroscience research”, adding: “Her work using organoids to investigate brain barriers, primate brain evolution, and foetal brain development will help reveal fundamental knowledge about how human brains evolved and how they are affected by disease.”
Madeline earned her degree in biochemistry from Occidental College in Los Angeles, and her PhD in biomedical sciences from the University of California, San Diego, for a thesis project studying signalling at the primary cilium.
Prior to joining the LMB in 2015, she was a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute of Molecular Biotechnology of the Austrian Academy of Sciences (IMBA) in Vienna, where she developed the first brain organoids as a way to help study brain development
Two previous LMB scientists have been recognised by the Blavatnik Awards in the UK. M Madan Babu and John Briggs were both named in the inaugural UK awards in 2018.
Meanwhile, the organisers said Gonçalo’s “revolutionary translational research holds great promise for new breakthroughs in gene editing, labelling of specific proteins in living cells, and the development of new therapeutics”.
He said: “I am humbled and grateful the work of my research group has been recognised with this award. We bridge disciplines to develop new chemical tools to provide fundamental biological knowledge and design the next generation of targeted therapeutics.”
Gonçalo uses his organic chemistry background to harness the intrinsic reactivity of specific functional groups within biological macromolecules like DNA, RNA and proteins to create biological probes and novel therapeutic agents.
He has developed bioorthogonal tools – chemical species that can react in live cells without interfering with native processes – that allow the manipulation of biological macromolecules using small molecule probes. An example of this is Click-Seq, a method that can be used to edit and analyse RNA modifications directly in cells.
It uses “click chemistry” to install a small molecule RNA degrader directly on RNA, which allows the mapping and degradation of specific RNA modifications. He has also established a series of reactions that are “chemoselective” – in other words, favouring one specific chemical entity – for lysine and cysteine amino acids within proteins. This allows him to modify selectively the most reactive sites within a protein – a tool that can help modulate protein activity, aid the delivery of targeted therapeutics or tag with fluorogenic probes.
The three laureates and nine finalists will be honoured in a ceremony at the Victorian and Albert Museum in London on February 28.
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