The Wellcome Discovery Awards scheme provides funding for researchers and teams who want to pursue bold and creative research ideas to deliver significant shifts in understanding related to human life, health and wellbeing.
Professor Claus Nerlov leads a research group in the MRC Molecular Haematology Unit, which investigates how blood stem cells sustain blood cell production using single-cell biology and genetics.
Adequate blood cell production is critical to many important processes in the body, including oxygen transport, blood clotting, and our ability to fight off infectious organisms. Our genome contains many regulatory sequences that ensure blood stem cells can generate the right numbers of each blood cell type at any time.
In this Wellcome-funded project, the Nerlov Group will identify these regulatory elements, and the regulatory factors that control them. The goal is to better understand how blood cells are produced normally, how this process changes with ageing or diseases like blood cancers and allergies, and how infections can lead to increased production of blood cells that can kill the infectious organism. With this knowledge, the researchers aim to develop new treatment strategies that can correct insufficient or excessive production of blood cell types.
Speaking about the award, Professor Nerlov said:
Making a regulatory roadmap of blood cell production will allow a better understanding of blood disorders. This award will help us achieve this and also show us new ways to treat these diseases.