• Question: What disease or cancer are you working on at the moment?

    Asked by impendingdoom to Enda on 24 Apr 2020.
    • Photo: Enda O'Connell

      Enda O'Connell answered on 24 Apr 2020:


      Right now, the University is closed because of the lockdown, so we can’t work on anything new in the lab. We are using that time to do lots of other kinds of important work, like analysing the results from our experiments and writing them up as research papers. We have actually just had three papers accepted for publication. Two of them are looking at using the robot to find marine chemicals that can be used to transform stem cells into other kinds of cells. This is work I did with a scientist from Italy who came to Galway for a few years to work with us. The other paper is looking at using the robot along with a really cool automated microscope to look at the way cells die, so we can understand what is going on when we use different medicines to kill cancer cells and what happens when cells come into contact with toxic chemicals.
      When we (eventually) get back to the lab, there will be lots of new projects for us to work on as everyone has their thinking caps on right now and are applying for funding for new science, including covid-19 research. The next few years will be an exciting time for science

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