Nicola Woodroofe, Hanan Bokhamada and Rachel Waller recently presented their work at the British Society for Immunology Yorkshire Immunology Regional Group at their half-day symposium in Sheffield on the 12th June, University of Sheffield. Sarah Haywood-Small was one of the key organisers of the event along with colleagues from the University of Sheffield.

Prof Nicola Woodroofe began the meeting with an overview of the ADAM’s enzyme family in multiple sclerosis. Further talks followed; which included presentations from Hanan Bokhamada (BMRC, Sheffield Hallam University), Gururaj Arumugakani (University of Leeds, an ex SHU biosciences MSc student) and Rachel Waller (University of Sheffield and Sheffield Hallam University). The symposium ended with the keynote address delivered by Professor Janet Lord (University of Birmingham) entitled ‘Ageing and immunity: A stressful combination’. The inspirational lecture generated a lot of questions and interest from the audience.

Dr Rowena Bunning attended the 6th European Workshop on Cannabinoid Research at Trinity College Dublin in April 2013. Here she gave an oral presentation on some of the work of her PhD student, Sara Dunn, who was unfortunately unable to attend because of an accident prior to the meeting. Sara is funded by a BMRC PhD studentship and is supervised by Dr Rowena Bunning and Dr Christine Le Maitre from Sheffield Hallam University and Dr Aileen Crawford and Professor Mark Wilkinson from the University of Sheffield. The work presented was on cannabinoid receptor expression in human osteoarthritic chondrocytes. This is related to their work on determining whether cannabinoids can prevent cartilage breakdown, as occurs in osteoarthritis, and therefore have potential in the development of novel anti arthritic drugs.

Professor Nicola Woodroofe and Rachel Waller attended the XI European Meeting on Glial Cells in Health and Disease in Berlin on July 3-6th. Rachel presented a poster entitled 'Identification and quantification of proteins in tissue sections and laser capture microdissected astrocytes by matrix assisted laser desorption ionization mass spectrometry imaging (MALDI-MSI)'. Nicola Woodroofe gave a talk entitled 'Effect of silencing ADAM17 expression by an adenoviral vector-mediated RNA interference approach in chronic relapsing experimental autoimmune encephalomyelitis'.