In the last two years the NIHR Biomedical Research Centre in
collaboration with its partners at Imperial College and University College
London and with the Francis Crick Institute, have rolled out an exciting one-year
fellowship programme targeting clinical trainees who are committed to a career
in academic medicine.
The goal is to exploit the cutting-edge science at the Crick Institute with the
extended portfolio of translational research opportunities at the Biomedical
Research Centre. Joining me today is Doctor Robin Dart, gastroenterology
trainee and one of our first BRC Crick fellows. Robin, how far had you got on your
gastroenterology training before you started thinking about this research project?
I was about halfway through my gastroenterology training I'd initially
done my SHO training here at Guy's and St Thomas' and then moved to North East
London to do that and I was well along with my procedural skills and I was
really looking for an option to do some research training and so the Francis
Crick Institute fellowships were a really good way of me getting into the lab
full-time to do some basic science research.
Now your project is around innate immunity and inflammation so how did that link
with the sorts of conditions that you had been dealing with as a clinical trainee?
So I became interested in the inflammatory bowel diseases quite early when I was at medical school
and I found that I was interested in host immune interactions and so I wanted to do
something in innate immunology because it's central to inflammatory bowel
disease and inflammatory bowel disease pathogenesis.
So how did you find out about the Crick fellowships?
So I'd been looking for some research opportunities
and I had previously worked with one of the consultants at Guy's and St Thomas',
Peter Irving and he introduced me to Professor Hayday who has an interest
in this area and
who then put together a Francis Crick Institute fellowship which I then applied for
So that year that you had preparing, getting data, and preparing for
external funding, tell me a little bit about and the advantages of that extra year
So this has been a really brilliant opportunity for me to get into the lab.
I've really enjoyed actually being able to do the research which I've been
planning on doing for quite some time. Being able to be in the lab has just
given me the opportunity to actually understand what I'm doing, develop my
research question further and I think it's really really important I think I would have
really struggled to get further funding to complete this as a PhD had I not had
that experience which I'm having at the moment .
And did the research plan overall change while... once you joined the lab?
I think it did. So we started off with a focus on one aspect of this immune surveillance or innate
immunity if you like, and I've really broadened that out and changed my focus of that
to make it more relevant to the inflammatory bowel disease question.
And then you applied to the Wellcome Trust for funding how did that go?
So it was it was a lot of work to put the grant application together and I was very lucky that I
wasn't in full clinical training trying to do it in the evenings and after clinic.
So I put that together and then I went to interview to defend the project
and I think I was very well-equipped to defend the project because I'd spent so
much time in the laboratory. I was also well prepared having had several mock
interviews including with the BRC and that made it a much less stressful day
than it may otherwise have been.
So, a bit more about the project. What sort of laboratory skills have you acquired in the last year or so?
So the majority of what I've done recently has been
tissue culture and flow cytometry and some activation so i'm looking
at ex vivo cells
I'm also learning skills, molecular skills in transfecting cell lines and PCR.
I'm in a really big multi-disciplinary lab so it's been really good. I've been
able to learn different techniques from different people
and that's really what I wanted from my PhD.
And finally how do you think that having the link with the
Crick will help support your research?
So the Crick is a really exciting opportunity and it's great to be one of the first clinicians in there.
So what I've mainly been doing is some immunohistochemistry at the Crick
Institute which is at Lincoln's Inn Fields currently and will move to Kings Cross and
then the bioinformatics is going to be extremely important and we're going to
use their sequencing facility to further understand these cells in much greater
detail than we would otherwise have been able to.
Robin congratulations on your Wellcome fellowship and thank you for telling us about your project and the fellowship
you been working on thanks very much.
So Robin's experience highlights the value
of taking time out of a busy clinical schedule and spending time in the
laboratory preparing for a highly competitive research fellowship programme.