Dr Mark Williams
Group Leader / Senior Lecturer in Biomedicine
Mark’s research focusses on the signalling pathways that regulate the physiology of the human gut epithelium in health, inflammatory bowel disease and colorectal cancer. The Williams lab ethos is to understand the homeostatic mechanisms that promote human life-long GI health so that the onset of disease can be prevented or treated using precision medicine.
Mark’s group has been at the forefront of developing 3D models of the native human colonic epithelium. They have developed a living human intestinal organoid platform to study chemoprevention & personalised medicine for colorectal cancer. Comparative functional genomic studies of organoids derived from healthy individuals and organoids/tumouroids cultured from colon cancer patients are being used in the following studies:
- Intestinal stem cell regulation in relation to colon cancer risk and tumour growth
- Investigation of the calcium signalling pathway in health, and in relation to pre-cancerous and neoplastic cancer cell growth
- Understanding the regulation of mucus secretion in relation to colon cancer risk