 Fran, what's changed at your end since I've been gone? Oh, Roma, almost running around. I'm getting a bit old for this. I've got some aches and pains. But to be honest, I have come to exactly the right place, haven't I, Miriam? Fran, you've come to exactly the right place. So we're developing the first National Rehabilitation Centre for the country. We've never had one before. We're right in the centre of the country near Nottingham and Loughborough. And we will be combining clinical teams with research and teaching and training all in one centre. Right next door to the military centre, which is already there, which was, to be honest, was the catalyst for this programme. Sounds great. Sounds exactly what's needed. Exactly what's needed. So if you have a bad traffic accident or you have a period of illness and you need that rehab process, then we'll be getting people through really early in their journey, giving them that intense burst so that they can then go back into their community and work settings and carry on progressing. And some of the tech that we're developing will help that ongoing process. And by having everything in one place, yeah, it means that the tech that you can use could be things that, if it was just small practices, they perhaps couldn't get hold of. Absolutely. So research sometimes takes a long time to get into clinical practice. So we're doing it all at the same space. Yeah, and I'll hand over to Mark who can tell you more about the tech. Oh Mark, come in. I want to know a bit more. Thank you so much, Miriam. So that's all right. I'm going to start with this person. Oh, a little accidental. The reason this is an interesting creature, because it loses a limb, it can grow on back. Absolutely. And one of the things which we've talked about is if that happened to you, or what could you do about it, and what steps would you need to take, and then what would need to happen after those things had happened. So for example, in our stand, we're talking a little bit about how you might be able to grow new tissues, grow new tissues through your arm or your leg, whatever. Then when you did that, how would you monitor them? What kind of interventions would you need to make sure that the tissue actually worked properly? And integrate. And integrate. Absolutely. What supports, what devices might you need to be able to monitor what you did and how you did it? And I think the thing to say, which is moved on most, I think for the last decade for this work, is we have stem cells, we have 3D printing materials, we have smart materials, we have wearable technologies, we have smartphone apps, and all that stuff coming together enables us to do some of the things we want to do. And Pip's going to demonstrate some of it to you now. Thank you so much, Mark. Pip, it's all about making it obtainable, isn't it? And to be used in your home. Yeah, and what we're going to do is get you to sit on this screen. I was going to say you're gesturing for me to sit down. I'm going to sit on this sensor mat. And this is a game, really, to help you build up your muscles in your bottom. That's my bottom, right? That's your bottom on the screen. And you've got quite a nice symmetrical bottom there. Thank you. But what we'd like you to do is to try and build up some more muscle. And so you're going to lean forward and back and start moving the little black dot on the screen. That black dot there. And what you'll be doing when you go around is knocking out those little things. And this helps our patients actually do more exercise and get more rehabilitation. I'm going to go this way. People can do it in their own homes. They can do it all at once. I've got one, not the other one. You're going to go for the green one? This is really good fun. It is really good fun. But also, it means that we can actually get lots of people working together at the same time. Doing it across the devices that we've set up. Yeah, because of course it's just a mat with a TV screen. So you could do it at home or you could get people to stall in a room together. It's not just like this one-off treatment that people have just got to go one at a time. And when you have rehab, you need to do it lots and lots and lots. Most of it you should do it not even more. It's the notification of it, right? It's brilliant. This is a lot of fun. I haven't sat down all day, Pip. This is brilliant. Roma, I am going to continue playing this. But in the meantime, it's back to you. Go on, go on. Maybe a muscle. Maybe a muscle, so run out. Run out. You can't sit still, can you, Fran? Well, I'm here with Andrew Caple from the University of Loughborough to talk more about their pioneering work. Welcome, Andy. Now, I have a dodgy hip from, I'm guessing from my pregnancy. It's been there for a long time. How many people are affected by having some kind of aches and pains and injuries that need rehabilitation? Well, at any one time, we think there's about one in three people in the UK are undergoing some form of rehabilitation. I think probably the thing to consider is that when we're talking about rehabilitation, we're not always thinking about prosthetics or splints or wheelchairs. We're thinking about a much broader subset of life-changing events or conditions. So, you're thinking mental health, physical health as well. So, yeah, one in three at any one time. And part of the work you do is growing muscles in a lab. Tell me more about that. So, at the moment, if you want to develop a new treatment or a new therapy, then the process that you have to go through is you have to do some basic laboratory culture works. You then have to test it in animals and then you put it in through to human trials. Obviously, the middle part of that, the animal testing has a lot of ethical issues associated with it. So, we want to remove that. And the human part of it is quite challenging because in terms of throughput, it's difficult to do large-scale studies. What we're trying to do is recreate human biology but in a laboratory. So, we're growing miniaturized organoids, if you like, that can do what a human being does, which allows us to test out lots of new treatments and lots of new therapies in a rapid way. And then we can develop new treatments from there. Looking forward into the future, what we hope to be able to do is actually grow tissues that completely mimic an individual's biology. And then, if a tissue was damaged or lost as a result of an injury or disease, then we'd be able to use that tissue to replace the tissue that was damaged or lost. And when you're testing these drugs or therapies on the stuff that you're growing in the lab, even if you're growing like a smaller organ, does it scale up? Yeah, so that's one of the real challenges of the technology is the scalability. So, there's a biological challenge towards that. In the body, you have a vascular system that provides oxygen and nutrients to the tissues that keeps them alive. So, you need to be able to recreate that biologically. But then there's also a manufacturing scalability as well. So, you need to produce cellular material basically on a large enough volume so that you can manufacture big bits of tissue. But theoretically, there's no limitations. And then you send them to the gym? I hear. Yeah, we do send them to the gym. So, you think how a human being develops, it's obviously born, and then it starts to kind of load itself and goes through exercise. So, it takes a long period of time for humans to get to that kind of physically mature state. We don't want to be growing our tissues for 21 years before we can send them out into the real wide world. So, what we try and do is we try and fast-track that process. So, basically, we put them through a gym protocol. So, what that means in reality is we provide them with either little electrical impulses that recreate the electrical impulses that come from your brain. Just like you're doing 50 crunches in half a second or something. Or we physically stretch them, which again recreates the kind of the biological movement that you might do in a gym regime. And we can effectively change that to different exercise regimes that mimic maybe a kind of resistance training or an endurance training session or something like that so we can tailor the tissues whichever way we want them to go. And are those muscles then being used directly in the human body in some way or is it mainly to do the studies alongside the person? Yeah, so at the moment the kind of state of the art is that we can manufacture tissues that kind of look and behave like human beings and we can use them for clinical testing. As we move forward where we want to get to is we want those tissues to mimic exactly your biology. So, for instance, I could take either a blood sample or a skin swab, get the cells from that and then culture that up into a tissue that mimics exactly what you would do in response to a specific therapy. And then moving forward into the future, then we're looking at potentially implantation of lost tissue. And what would that allow you to treat? Yes, that's a really interesting question. A lot of life-changing events are not expected. So in those instances it might be more challenging to have a kind of a banker tissue sort of stored away but where you maybe have a chronic condition where you're struggling to treat something via a normal process and you're maybe getting degradation of the tissue over a long period of time, then you could look at a route where you actually ask someone to maybe donate some blood or some cells and we'll go away and culture up some tissue in the lab and then come back and maybe surgically replace the tissue that's failing. So it allows it to kind of be rejuvenated and gain a new life, I guess, fresh lease of life. Yeah, exactly. So where there's a defect in the natural biology, then we could replace that defect and kind of look to then go through a normal rehabilitative process with that kind of new healthy tissue. I mean, it sounds like you must be working with a big different range of people, different kind of degrees, backgrounds, areas of research. Could you tell me a little bit about how all of that comes together? I think effective research needs teams of people who come from different backgrounds as well. I don't think it's a great team if everyone has the same skill set. So the team that we have at Loughborough is really diverse. We recruit people from all different facets of life. So it's a really nice balance of people to work with. And what have you been telling all the students that have been visiting your stall? What are the kind of questions and what are the interests? I've not been on yet. You've not been on yet? No, I'm in my first sessions after this. So I'll have to get back to you on that one. Oh, really, well, good luck with that. I think they're a very energetic bunch, but it's been great to talk to you about your research.