David Hay

Group Leader and Professor of Tissue Engineering

Biography

Background

  • Group leader of the Pluripotent Stem Cell Hepatocyte Development team 
  • Expert in cell differentiation and tissue engineering 
  • Over 15 years’ experience in pluripotent stem cell biology 
  • Experience of start-up company formation and securing seed funding
  • PhD 2000 and BSc (Hons) 1996, University of St Andrews, UK

Open to PhD supervision enquiries?

Yes

Current PhD students supervised

  • Matthew Sinton (PhD Student shared with BHF CVR)
  • Angus Marks (PhD Student shared with Chemistry)
  • Sharmin Alhaque (PhD Student shared with Brunel University)
  • Gregor Skeldon (PhD Student shared with Strathclyde University)

Research summary

Liver Tissue Development and Engineering

The liver plays a vital role in human health, including the detoxification of foreign substances. We use stem cells to grow liver tissue in the laboratory. The stem cells we use are called human embryonic stem cells and induced pluripotent stem cells. The attraction of using these cell populations is their indefinite growth in the lab and their ability to form all the cells found in the human body. We have developed reliable methods for building human liver tissue. Encouragingly, it behaves in a similar way to the liver found in the human body. We believe our liver tissue has an important part to play in improving human drug development and repurposing; modelling human disease and in the future may provide an alternative source of human tissue to treat failing human liver function.

Dave Hay Research Group page

Knowledge exchange

Futurum careers article

We work collaboratively with a number of groups in Edinburgh:

Stuart Forbes, Ian Wilmut, Bruno Peault, Anura Rambukkana, Jim Ross, Mark Bradley, Anthony Callanan, Mandy Drake, Colin Campbell, Carsten Hansen

We collaborate with other researchers in the UK and overseas:

 

Our industry partners include:

This article was published on