Our group has been awarded proof-of-concept funding from the Scottish Government to develop a groundbreaking drug screening platform for Parkinson's disease. The technology enables high-throughput screening of compounds that target the small, soluble forms of misfolded proteins believed to drive neurodegeneration. Until now, these species have been impossible to measure at the scale required for drug discovery. The platform will also be adaptable to Alzheimer's disease, Motor Neuron Disease, and other protein-aggregation conditions. This funding allows us to take a technology that works in a specialised optics lab and prove it can operate at industrial scale. This will enable us to screen thousands of compounds per day, seeing if any of them can remove the species that cause damage in Parkinson’s disease

Mathew has been named winner of the RSC’s Jeremy Knowles Award, for the generation of single-molecule fluorescence microscopy approaches for visualising protein aggregates in neurodegenerative disease and protein-membrane disruption, and their application in drug discovery. Mathew receives £3000, a medal and a certificate. The Royal Society of Chemistry’s prizes have recognised excellence in the chemical sciences for more than 150 years. This year’s winners join a prestigious list of past winners in the RSC’s prize portfolio, 60 of whom have gone on to win Nobel Prizes for their work, including 2022 Nobel laureate Carolyn Bertozzi and 2019 Nobel laureate John B Goodenough. On receiving the prize, Mathew said: It’s a wonderful recognition not just of my own work, but of the many students, postdocs, clinical collaborators and industrial partners I’ve been fortunate to work with. For me, this award underlines the value of using physical chemistry to tackle real biological and medical prob...

Congratulations go to our MSc student, Beth Fisher, who has not only won a prize for the taught component of her MSc in Medicinal and Biological Chemistry, but also scooped the research presentation prize. Beth has done an excellent job on progressing our work on ovarian cancer with Dr Mike Rimmer, and will be missed when she starts her graduate degree in medicine at Cambridge later in the year. 

Huge congratulations to Noelia on passing her viva. Thank you also to Amy Buck and Mike Devine for examining Noelia. 

Dan Edwards, a postdoctoral research associate in the group, has been awarded a prestigious early postdoctoral fellowship from the Chief Scientist Office (CSO), part of the Scottish Government Health Directorate. Dan did his PhD with Prof. Scott Cockroft and Dr Amanda Jarvis, and joined the ESMB group as part of a Leverhulme-funded project between Prof. Scott Cockroft and Prof. Mathew Horrocks. Dan has previously won the Institute for Regeneration and Repair's Innovator 2026 competition, and runs an outreach science activity funded by AIBIO-UK. He's also on the School's Post-Doc Committee.   Dan will begin the three-year fellowship this year with a project focused on advancing Parkinson's disease diagnosis through biomarkers that enable early detection from accessible biofluids.  On the award, Dan said: "It is an honour to be awarded the CSO early postdoctoral fellowship. This award will give me the time and resources to develop assays to improve our approaches to ...

Noelia has become the second member of the group to win the Joseph Black Conference science photo competition. Her photo, entitled "Ground Breaking Science", shows Tianxiao and Kris determining the focal length of a lens in the corridor of the Chemistry School. 

Dan has been awarded the IRR Innovator 2026 prize, along with £5,000 in research funding. Dan's winning idea centres on the use of extracellular vesicles, tiny particles that can be isolated from all biological fluids, as a tool for the early diagnosis of Parkinson's disease, a breakthrough approach with significant clinical potential. The competition was organised in partnership with Dr Andrew McBryde of Edinburgh Innovations' ITPA Translational Community, and judged by a distinguished panel of industry experts: Hayley Gooding (Concept Life Sciences), Lissa Herron (Converge Challenge), and Douglas Gibson (previous IRR Innovator winner). Dan said: The IRR Innovator competition provided a fantastic opportunity to present my research to a broad audience and think creatively about its future commercial impact. I'm grateful for the insight and comments from the panel and look forward to using the award to progress my research.

Last weekend ESMB PhD students   Sofia   and Ellie attended the 29th EAP meeting held by the Analytical Science Network in Kettering, with both of them giving talks about their projects. Ellie presented her research on imaging and detecting PM2.5s in the brain, while   Sofia   spoke about her work designing a nanopore sensing platform for early diagnosis of ovarian cancer. The conference was a fantastic opportunity to meet fellow PhD students working in analytical science, as well as to network with industry and academic professionals in these fields.

Mathew has been selected as a finalist among 9 Young Scientists from Across the UK Shortlisted for Largest Unrestricted Science Prize. Three Blavatnik Awards for Young Scientists Laureates will receive £100,000 prizes at a 24 February gala in London. The Blavatnik Family Foundation and The New York Academy of Sciences today announced the Finalists for the 2026 Blavatnik Awards for Young Scientists in the United Kingdom. The Awards recognise scientific advances by UK researchers across Life Sciences, Chemical Sciences, and Physical Sciences & Engineering. On Tuesday, 24 February, Professor Deborah Prentice, Vice-Chancellor of the University of Cambridge, will reveal the three 2026 Laureates at a gala dinner and awards ceremony in London. Now in its ninth year, each Blavatnik Awards Laureate will receive an unrestricted £100,000 prize, while the remaining six Finalists will be awarded £30,000 each. Commenting on this remarkable achievement, Mathew said: I am delighted to have been no...

Huge congratulations to Haresh, who has passed his PhD viva. Thank you to Aleks Ponjavic and Ewen Calder for examining!

We're happy to welcome Ellie (PhD student), Muye (PhD student), and Charlie (5P student) to the group. We wish them the best of luck with their projects! 

We have developed an innovative method to detect small biological particles in blood samples, opening up new possibilities for earlier and more accurate disease diagnosis.  The technique, which we refer to as VISTA (Vesicle Imaging by Single-molecule TCCD Analysis), allows scientists to characterise tiny particles called extracellular vesicles (EVs), which are released by cells into the blood.  “This new tool is of huge potential, offering an easy way to obtain information from patient blood samples, without the need for invasive biopsies.” - Noelia. EVs carry molecular information of their cells of origin and are increasingly recognised as potential biomarkers for diseases such as cancer, Parkinson’s disease, and infections. However, because EVs are highly variable, and similar in size to other particles in the blood, they have been difficult to study using traditional methods. This new approach combines fluorescent labelling (to make EVs glow), microfluidics (a system that m...

Our post-doc Abigail attended the  annual Target ALS meeting in Boston last week along with the rest of our consortium members, including Gian Tartaglia, Jenna Gregory, Fergal Waldron, and Neil Shneider. Abigail was invited to present our group’s work on detecting TDP-43 in biological fluids using our TDP-43 aptamer ( Zacco et al., 2022 ) and super-resolution microscopy. There was also a sneak-peek of some of our work using the FUS aptamers, some of which is now in a pre-print ( Zacco et al., 2025 )! It's always great to hear about progress made in this field, many thanks to the organisers for hosting and to all our fellow consortium members who did a great job presenting our work. 

  Last week, some members of the ESMB group attended the Synuclein meeting 2025 to hear about current and future approaches to target synulceinopathies. This event offered a very varied programme, with talks ranging from clinical and pre-clinical studies in the field of Parkinson’s disease and Multiple System Atrophy all the way to super-resolution imaging of aSynuclein aggregates. It was an amazing experience to get to hear from groups that have changed this field over the years and also to see all the new projects being set up to study these diseases onset and progression, therapies and diagnosis. It felt like going back to the origins of the group, where it all started! Finally, Gala dinner/party at King’s College Hall was definitely a highlight of the programme.

Researchers from the ESMB have developed a single-molecule liposome assay that promises to transform the study of membrane disruption by proteins and peptides. Their innovative method, funded by the Leverhulme Trust, addresses longstanding challenges in membrane-related research across antimicrobial activity, toxicity, and disease pathology. Membrane integrity is crucial for cellular health, playing a vital role in processes such as ion transport and signal transmission. Disruption of these membranes is linked to various disorders, including Alzheimer's and Parkinson’s disease, and certain cancers. Traditional techniques for examining the membrane-disrupting effects of proteins and peptides can be challenging and often require larger quantities, which are costly and difficult to produce. Their new approach uses single-molecule confocal microscopy with fast-flow microfluidics to detect membrane disruption with minimal quantities of proteins and peptides. This method provides unparal...

Mathew and Noelia were recently invited to attend the Japan-UK neuroscience meeting being held in Osaka, Japan. The meeting, jointly funded by AMED and MRC, sought to strengthen connections between researchers in the UK and Japan. The meeting was a fantastic opportunity to share their research, and also learn about other work being conducted by neuroscientists in the two countries. Delegates were also treated to trip to a local castle, and were serenaded by talented singers in an impromptu Karaoke bar visit!

Many congratulations to Zuzanna, who has passed her PhD viva. Also, huge thanks to Professors Anita Jones and Salvador Ventura for examining Zuzanna. 

Congratulations to Katie, Candace and Takeshi, who have published a new paper in eLife.  Building on a hypothesis first proposed by Francis Crick in 1984, the research addresses how the brain retains memories despite the continuous turnover of proteins. Crick theorised that specialised proteins could bind in pairs, allowing one to be replaced while the other stabilises the connection, preserving memories over time. The research team led by Professor Seth Grant and Professor Mathew Horrocks tested this hypothesis, focusing on a protein essential for learning and memory called PSD95. Using advanced forms of microscopy and genetic techniques that enables visualisation of protein pairs isolated from the mouse brain, they confirmed Crick's theory.  They also discovered that the protein exchange occurs slowest in those areas of the brain responsible for long-term memory. Professor Horrocks commented, "It was exciting to directly visualise synaptic building blocks at nanometre resolu...

Huge congratulations to Beccy Saleeb, who has been shortlisted for a prize from Women in Neuroscience UK. The prize is to award rising stars in neuroscience, and Beccy will be attending the prize ceremony at the University of Cambridge in November. 

Part of our group visited Swansea for the British Biophysics Society Biennial Meeting 2024. Awesome science combined with a beautiful venue! We all really enjoyed hearing about all the advances in biophysics research being made in the UK (and abroad!). Looking forward to the 2026 meeting, and the poster flash talks as a new addition to the programme. Thanks to the Society for organising.