RSS Feeds

Email a Friend Printer Friendly

New laboratory for research in gastroenterology

February 07, 2001

At 12.30 pm on Wednesday, 7 February, in the University of Liverpool, Nobel Laureate Professor Erwin Neher will open a £3 million laboratory for research into diseases of the gastrointestinal tract and the pancreas.

The new laboratory will be used for research into pancreatitis, cancers of the colon, stomach and peptic ulceration. A particular interest will be how calcium and the hormone gastrin are used as chemical messengers within the gut and pancreas and how cell death is controlled.

The University’s Departments of Medicine and Physiology won funding for the new laboratory from the Joint Infrastructure Fund, a national fund set up by the Government in partnership with the Wellcome Trust to support research excellence. The award confirmed the University of Liverpool as a centre of world class research in gastroenterology.

The new laboratory will be used by a research group led by Professor Alastair Watson in the Department of Medicine and research groups led by Professor Graham Dockray and Professor Ole Petersen in the Department of Physiology. Creating the new laboratory breaks new ground by establishing a close collaboration between clinical investigations and basic biological science.

The laboratory is equipped with a £400,000 two photon microscope which will enable the three research groups to study at very high resolution fine details in living cells from the pancreas, intestine and stomach.

Professor Alastair Watson said: “Research in gastrointestinal science will contribute to improved diagnosis and treatment of a number of diseases. Cancers of the gastrointestinal tract – bowel, stomach, pancreas and oesophagus – kill more people than any other group of cancers. Severe pancreatitis is fatal in one in four cases. Stomach and duodenal ulcers cause fewer deaths but are very common and are a major cause of ill health in the UK.”

The University of Liverpool is well placed to throw more light on these diseases. It has an international reputation for the quality of its research in gastroenterology. Professor Graham Dockray and colleagues are credited with a major breakthrough in the understanding of gastrin when they discovered that the hormone which causes acid secretion in the stomach also plays a role in causing gastric cancer. Professor Ole Petersen’s work on pancreatitis led to his prestigious appointment to a Medical Research Council Research Professorship and to a Fellowship of the Royal Society. The Department of Physiology was awarded a 5 * rating – the only one in the UK - in the last research assessment exercise conducted by the Higher Education Research Funding Council for England.

Professor Erwin Neher of the Max-Plank Institute, Göttingen, Germany, will open the laboratory. He won the Nobel Prize for Physiology and Medicine in 1991with his colleague Bert Sakmann for their discoveries concerning single ion channels in cells. Their work has opened up a whole new research area into how cells work. It is a great honour for the University that he has agreed to come to Liverpool. His visit strengthens his personal links with the University and endorses the importance of the new laboratory.




Liverpool, University of