Meet our new guest blogger, Alzheimer's disease researcher Selina Wray...

I’ve had some great feedback since starting my blog at www.whatsyourlifelike.com and I was particularly excited to receive an e-mail from EuroStemCell this morning to ask if I would write for them too.  This will be the first post that will be cross-posted across both sites and so I thought I would write a brief introduction for any new readers who have come here through an interest in stem cells.

First of all, a confession:  I am not a stem cell biologist.  The primary focus of my research is Alzheimer’s disease and frontotemporal lobar degeneration, two forms of dementia that currently affect around 820,000 people in the UK alone. There is currently no effective treatment for these devastating diseases and our work aims to understand what causes the cells of the brain (neurons) to die in dementia by using cell models that mimic the disease process.  Stem cells can help us do this because they have the ability to become any of the cell types of the body, and so by converting stem cells carrying genes that are linked to dementia into neurons, we have a model of disease that we can study in the laboratory.

UCL Institute of Neurology is a major centre for dementia research in the UK.  It is not, however, a major centre for stem cell research.  In fact working with stem cells is an entirely new area of research for us and requires a specialised set of skills to know how to maintain and work with these cells.  Sometimes practice does not make perfect, and although we tried to set this up at UCL Institute of Neurology, without the necessary expertise in the department I was at risk of repeating the same mistakes over and over again, making little progress and ending up like Sisyphus, who in greek mythology was compelled to push a huge boulder to the top of a hill only to watch it roll back down again and repeat this for eternity.  Rather than consign myself to this fate I moved to Edinburgh in July 2011 to work with Dr Tilo Kunath at the MRC Centre for Regenerative Medicine.  Hopefully by spending a year or so immersed in stem cells, stem cells and more stem cells I can learn enough to help us set this up back at UCL. 

Moving to a department with entirely different focus and knowledge base after 7 years of Alzheimer’s research was an intimidating experience but I have been made to feel extremely welcome by my new colleagues and their patience is making me feel less like a fish out of water as I set out on this new phase of research.  This blog will document my steep learning curve as I try to get to grips with a whole new field of biology, move my own project forward, absorb as much as I can from the stem cell experts around me and embrace these cells as more than just a means to an end as I try to earn the title of “stem cell researcher”.