When we are injured, suffer disease or get older, our organs and tissues become damaged and dysfunctional. To try and promote the regeneration of our tissues, we’re trying to deliver drugs to specific cells in tissues called stem cells.

We’re doing this by designing tiny nanoparticles – just 1/1000th the width of a single human hair in diameter – that can carry a variety of proteins and compounds. We know that a molecular pathway called the Wnt pathway is particularly important in controlling how stem cells divide and differentiate. However, the same pathway can have potentially detrimental effects on other cell types.

To make sure that molecules and drugs are carried only to stem cells, we are ‘tagging’ our drug carriers with molecular flags that are only recognised and taken up by specific cell types. Ultimately we hope that this technology can be used to treat injury and degenerative disease in bones and the skin.