Some of our tissues and organs can be pretty handy at repairing themselves – except when they’re not, for various reasons. That’s where regenerative medicine comes in. Dr Helen Weavers, Associate Professor in Cell and Developmental Biology in the School of Biochemistry, takes us into the world of tissue resilience and describes the pleasure of witnessing the wonders of natural tissue repair first-hand.
In regenerative medicine, we explore ways to either repair or replace damaged organs or tissues in the body, whether that’s because of injury, disease or age. Some tissues in our bodies – the liver, gut and skin, for example – can naturally regenerate themselves very well, and often do so as a matter of course (although this self-repair ability declines as we get older). What can we learn from these organs, and can we extend it to other places in the body?
The concept has been around for a while, but the technology has accelerated in the last few years, thanks to new techniques that enable us to do things like growing human tissue or an organ in the lab. This, together with our growing biological knowledge, has made the idea of regenerative medicine much closer to becoming a reality in the clinic.
Art + science = career
My parents tell me that as a child I always wanted to understand how things worked. I’d take things apart to figure out how they were made, then put them back together again. But I probably liked art more than science to begin with. In fact, to be a good scientist, I think you need to be quite creative and come up with new ideas and approaches. So it makes sense that I’m doing what I’m doing now.
I studied biological sciences at university, but I didn’t really know I wanted to do research until I had a short summer project in one of the labs when I was an undergraduate at Cambridge. I loved developing my own ideas and designing experiments to test them. My supervisor for that project, Professor Helen Skaer, was inspirational – a really successful female group leader who also had a very active family and social life. I stayed on in her lab for a PhD, after which I came to Bristol.
Getting the group together
Sometimes things align in delightfully unexpected ways. I’d worked on kidney biology during my PhD, then at Bristol I switched to something completely different – skin wound repair and inflammation. When I was thinking about what I wanted to focus on in my own research lab, I started exploring where else these important pathways for skin repair might be useful or important for. I hadn’t thought about the kidney for quite a few years, but after generating some intriguing data, it suddenly struck me that these two processes – how a kidney works and how skin heals itself – might actually have lots of similarities. Kidneys are constantly under stress and employ similar ‘resilience’ pathways to stay healthy. So I started my lab on that basis, and it’s what we work on now.
The lab is in constant flux but currently has eight members. Having a whole team of people, all interested in the same fundamental biology and helping to develop the projects with their own unique ideas, makes the whole experience really exciting. Many of the PhD students and some postdocs that I supervise, work jointly with other labs and group leaders in the Faculty, which offers great opportunities to collaborate with other groups; and the students and postdocs get to experience how other groups approach research.
Science, life and the future
I’d always read that embryos and young children heal very quickly, often without scarring, and that we lose some of that ability as we get older. But I’d had no personal experience of it – until recently, with my baby. They’ve got surprisingly sharp nails, and they often scratch themselves accidentally, and it’s amazing to see a bad-looking cut one day and think: ‘Oh my goodness, how have they done that to themselves?’ – then to find the next day that their skin is perfect again. I think it’s really cool that all these things I talk about in lectures or read about in textbooks I can now actually see for myself.
With modern medicine enabling people to live longer, the field of healthy ageing is growing massively. There’s a big drive to make those later years healthier, for example by improving older people’s kidney, brain, or heart function. So we want to understand why a kidney works well, and then why it doesn’t work so well when you get older or have a particular disease. And then we want to use that basic science insight to come up with therapies that might, for example, prevent a kidney in an older person from losing its function as much as before.
I’m on maternity leave at the moment, and I love spending time with my baby son, but I haven’t stopped thinking about science. I really like my keep-in-touch days when I come into the department to catch up with my lab and discuss their research. The fact that I still want to talk about the science, even during maternity leave, has made me realise this is the right career for me.
You can read more details of Dr Weavers’ research at tissueresilience.com, and in a news article about her Women in Cell Biology Early Career Medal 2025.