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Professor Jenny Southgate

Director, Jack Birch Unit for Molecular Carcinogenesis and York Biomedical Research Institute theme lead for Molecular and Cellular Medicine

Research


PURE Staff link York Research Database

Professor Jenny Southgate is Director of the Jack Birch Unit for Molecular Carcinogenesis (JBU) and holds a Research Chair funded externally by York Against Cancer. The research of the JBU focuses on human epithelial tissues and their cancers. Our aims are to understand the processes that control proliferation, differentiation and cellular organisation in normal and wounded epithelial tissues and how dysregulation of these processes leads to the development and progression of malignant disease.

Most of the work in the Unit focuses on urothelium, the specialised epithelium that lines the urinary tract and gives rise to bladder cancer. A range of cell and tissue culture systems have been developed to study urothelial cells from normal and diseased tissues, and methods have been established using retroviruses to enable gene manipulation in order to recapitulate the early stages of neoplastic development. The capacity for in vitro-propagated normal human urothelial cells to undergo differentiation and form a functional urinary barrier has led to an interest in reconstructing urothelial cells into functional tissues for the purpose of tissue engineering and we are also examining the use of natural biomaterials as scaffolds for this purpose.‌

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Contact details

Professor Jenny Southgate
Director, Jack Birch Unit for Molecular Carcinogenesis
Department of Biology (room B/M/016) & York Biomedical Research Institute
University of York
York
YO10 5DD

Tel: +44 (0) 1904 328705

https://www.york.ac.uk/biology/jack-birch-unit/