Dr Simon Tew BSc, Ph.D

My group is interested in the the biology of cells within our joints and the mechanisms that lead to age related diseases such as osteoarthritis. Joints contain a diverse selection of tissues such as cartilage, ligament and the synovial lining, which perform specialised roles and allow us to articulate our skeletons smoothly and quickly.

We are particularly interested in novel ways in which genes are controlled in these tissues. We have focussed on post-transcriptional regulation and have found that a significant number of gene transcripts exhibit different rates of turnover in cells from healthy or osteoarthritic cartilage. This is a very interesting phenomenon and we are now investigating what the consequences of this are in diseased tissue.

We use a range of in vivo and in vitro experimental model systems and employ an equally wide range of techniques to analyse these systems, spanning cutting edge transcriptomic analysis of cellular systems, studies of molecular interaction, gene and protein expression analysis and tissue imaging.