DiMeN Flexible Funding - 'Generation and Application of Organoid Disease Models' - Lorna Salvini

My flexible funding award enabled me to attend the ‘Generation and Application of Organoid Disease Models’ course organised by Wellcome Connecting Science at the Sanger Institute, Cambridgeshire, in Autumn 2023.

This residential course offered full immersion into organoid derivation, expansion, and downstream applications. Each day was a mixed timetable of theoretical lectures, wet-laboratory sessions, and seminars from established academics. The course brought together scientists at different career stages from all around the world, thus providing me with a new network of colleagues with whom I hope to collaborate with in the future. This was enriching both personally as research can often be isolating, but also professionally as high-quality research is always collaborative.

Organoid modelling is a large component of my PhD project, as I aim to generate a novel 3D model of uterine fibroids, and so attending this course in my first year was most beneficial as it has given me valuable hands-on experiences of numerous novel organoid techniques and applications including drug screening which is a key aim of my PhD project. All of the techniques and troubleshooting which I learned at this course are transferable to my own project and the wider work carried out in my laboratory group, thus I have been able to share my learning with others.

My attendance at this course has exponentially increased my skill set and confidence in 3D cell culture methodologies as the hands-on nature of the course allowed mistakes to be corrected while under expert supervision. This experience will of course be invaluable when I commence my organoid experiments in my own laboratory. The course also covered the use of organoids in fields out with my own, such as oncology and gastrointestinal medicine. This highlighted the transferable nature of my training and so opened my eyes to opportunities outside of my current field. More generally, exposure to the Sanger Institute provided me with an insight into the opportunities after my PhD including the scientific management and community engagement roles. These are job roles which were not on my radar before attending the course, however I now see they are essential for improving the training of scientists and awareness of the public, thus improving the quality of research outputs.

Type: High Cost Training in Areas of Recognised Strategic Need