Research

Professor Jenny Southgate was Director of the Jack Birch Unit for Molecular Carcinogenesis (JBU) and held a Research Chair funded externally by York Against Cancer. The research of the JBU focuses on human epithelial tissues and their cancers. Its aims are to understand the processes that control proliferation, differentiation and cellular organisation in normal and wounded epithelial tissues and how dysregulation of these processes leads to the development and progression of malignant disease.

Most of the work in the Unit focuses on urothelium, the specialised epithelium that lines the urinary tract and gives rise to bladder cancer. A range of cell and tissue culture systems have been developed to study urothelial cells from normal and diseased tissues, and methods have been established using retroviruses to enable gene manipulation in order to recapitulate the early stages of neoplastic development. The capacity for in vitro-propagated normal human urothelial cells to undergo differentiation and form a functional urinary barrier has led to an interest in reconstructing urothelial cells into functional tissues for the purpose of tissue engineering and we are also examining the use of natural biomaterials as scaffolds for this purpose.‌