Scottish Centre for Innovation in Spinal Cord Injury

Professor Sue Barnett

Prof Sue Barnett gained her PhD at the institute of Cancer Research in Sutton, was a visiting Fogarty Fellow at NIH, in Bethesda, USA, obtained a Wellcome Trust University Award, and was an MS Society Senior Research Fellow. Her post-doctoral training position was at the Ludwig Institute in London, where she gained her experience in neuroscience and glial cell biology as well as regenerative medicine and cell transplantation as a strategy for CNS repair.

Prof Barnett leads the Glial Cell Biology Group at the University of Glasgow. Her research interests focus on identifying strategies for CNS repair, particularly on cell transplantation and human and rodent stem cell biology. She is an expert on the culture of primary rodent/murine neural cells and establishing complex myelinating cultures to study aspects of neural development, spinal cord injury and remyelination. The lab works on growing human olfactory glia and MSCs and currently are focussing on producing GMP quality human olfactory mucosal-derived MSC as a candidate for the repair of CNS damage. She is also interested I n heparin sulphate (HS)  proteoglycans as a target to promote CNS repair and the lab is focussing on HS mimetics which have been shown to promote CNS repair in vitro and in vivo.

Research Projects:

• Heparin mimetics: Novel non-anticoagulant compounds to promote CNS repair
• Pre-Clinical validation of clinical grade human olfactory mucosal (OM)-derived mesenchymal stromal cells (MSCs)