Revolutionary Biology

You just have to step into your local chemist to see how far medicine has come over the past 100 years. Life changing drugs, which were once unthinkable – like antibiotics, insulin and the contraceptive pill – are now commonplace. But there’s still so much we don’t know about the medicines we take. Consider your average pack of Paracetamol pills; we know these work to cure headaches and pains, we know they’re relatively harmless when taken in small doses, but scientists still don’t really know how they work. And if we don’t know how existing drugs work, how can we design better ones?

Just over a decade ago the face of British farming changed forever. A devastating outbreak of Foot and Mouth disease led to the enforced slaughter and incineration of over 10 million livestock across the country. While this mass culling halted the spread of disease in the UK, the fight against Foot and Mouth continues to this day, predominately in developing countries. Fortunately, cutting edge structural biology research is paving the way for a new vaccine, set to revolutionise farming on a global scale.

Understanding the function of a protein is an important step in finding out why the body succumbs to disease – but how do scientists find these proteins and figure out how they work?

Our bodies are made up of trillions of cells but it doesn’t matter how closely you look, you still won’t see them. In fact, most of our cells are smaller than the width of a hair. To make sure that our bodies work correctly, our cells have to talk to each other – a pretty daunting task. So how do our cells communicate?