 I'm Dr Chris Spicer and I'm a lecturer in chemistry at the University of York. We're interested in designing three-dimensional materials that can serve as scaffolding to allow single human cells to grow and expand and communicate with each other like tissues that you'd find within the human body. We're hoping that it has a very broad impact across a wide range of human diseases, especially those in which tissue damage plays a key role. We also hope that this will be taken up by pharmaceutical companies who will see the benefits of having accurate tissue models for doing their drug discovery research. One of the materials we use the most in the lab are hydrogels. If you've ever had jelly at a kid's party, that's the most common hydrogel that people come across in their everyday life. So it's a structurally sound three-dimensional material, which is 95% water. So it's very highly hydrated and cells really enjoy growing within these kinds of materials. One of the major limitations of materials for growing cells and tissues at the moment is that they don't give cells many of the biological signals they need in order to grow into fully functional tissues. So we're trying to develop new chemistries that allow us to functionalize the peptides and proteins that cells need in a way that allows us to attach them to materials and control their activity. Although people are very good at growing cells and making them into multicellular systems, actually the tissues that are developed tend to poorly recreate the biology of the native tissues that we have in our body. So we became really interested in how we could take the materials that people are currently using within the scientific community and how we could functionalize them with potent peptides and proteins and enhance the biological signals that we're giving to cells. And if we could do that, we could make a real difference to the quality and the maturity of the tissues that we're engineering in the lab. And so that's the big challenge right now. How can we actually start to grow tissues which are mature, that are functional and actually recreate the really intricate details of disease tissues? Understanding biology at the tissue level is really important if we want to be able to ultimately treat disease. But doing research on tissues is really difficult. We can do studies within animal models, but there are obvious ethical implications with doing that research and also the physiology is very different between a mouse or a rat and humans. The most potent biological signaling molecules are the proteins that cells secrete and then bind to other cells in their vicinity. So these are flasks of the coli cells that are producing large quantities of the proteins that we're interested in. Also, we're really interested in using light to control the activity of the peptides and proteins. To do that, we need molecules that are able to absorb the light. And so we make a lot of molecules like these that have these really bright and beautiful colours. And that's because they're able to absorb specific wavelengths of light. By doing that, we can use different light sources to activate different biological processes at different times while we're growing our in vitro tissue model. A career development award is really important for us in allowing us to build an interdisciplinary team of researchers who can contribute to all aspects of the project. So we'll start off by hiring a synthetic chemist who can help us to build the key molecules we're going to need before then starting to bring in material scientists who can help us to build the scaffolds that we want to grow ourselves within and then cellular biologists who can really drive that research forward and start to ask important biological questions based on the research that we're developing. Discovery research is all about having that freedom to go after big ideas where you don't always know what the outcome is going to be, but you have that freedom to learn.