Out of this year's 25 prizes awarded at New Designers 2010 in London - which included over 3500 student exhibitors drawn from art and design schools across the UK - DJCAD students secured three of them, Elizabeth Humble, Alison Mehta and Pablo de la Peña topping the 'medal table' for the event. The College is part of the University of Dundee.

Elizabeth Humble is the winner of the New Designers Goldsmith's Company Jewellery Award. The prize comprises £1000, 10 years registration at the Goldsmiths' Company Assay Office, a place on the company’s ‘Getting Started’ business course and access to the Astley Clarke mentoring scheme. She has also won the opportunity to design an exclusive collection for Astley Clarke.

Alison Mehta, who graduated last month in Graphic Design, was named winner of the Hallmark Cards Award. She won £1000 and a month-long work placement with Hallmark.

Pablo de la Peña, a graduate in Interactive Media Design, won the Cyber-Duck Associate Award for his `SlopeScope’ project, which lets snowboarders film and share footage from the slopes. Pablo won a placement at Cyber-Duck, the renowed web design agency, and an iPad.

Gene silencing of corneal dystrophy

The new three-year research project is led by Professor Irwin McLean in the Division of Molecular Medicine at Dundee, and at Ulster by Dr Tara Moore, of the Centre for Molecular Biosciences, and consultant ophthalmologist Professor Johnny Moore.



The new project will apply recently developed "gene silencing" techniques to try to "switch off" a faulty gene in patients with corneal dystrophy.

It is hoped this will lead to a better treatment than corneal transplantation, which is currently the only option for severely affected individuals.



Professor McLean said: "We are very grateful to Fight for Sight for funding this project and we are extremely excited to commence working on a new therapy for this important group of eye disorders."



The grant award to Dundee and Ulster Universities is part of over £1.4m research funding by Fight for Sight. Each year the charity awards grants for original and ground-breaking research into eye disease at leading universities and hospitals across the UK.

"The Fight for Sight grants programme is extremely competitive and sadly every year we receive many more applications than we are able to support," added Michèle Acton, CEO of Fight for Sight.

"We have chosen to fund ten projects, across a number of disease areas, which offer real hope to the many people affected by blindness and eye disease.cientists at the University of Dundee have discovered a protein that
acts as a “molecular scissors” to repair damaged DNA in our cells, a
finding which could have major implications for cancer treatments.

Molecular scissors of DNA

Dr John Rouse (left) and colleagues in the Medical Research Council (MRC) Protein Phosphorylation Unit,
 based in the College of Life Sciences at Dundee, have
 discovered a protein, known as FAN1, present in each cell and playing a vital role in maintaining healthy DNA by  preventing mutations which can lead to cancers.

“The DNA in our cells is like an instruction manual for the proper
working of each cell,” said Dr Rouse, a Programme Leader in the
Medical Research Council Protein Phosphorylation Unit in the College of Life Sciences.

“A major problem is that DNA becomes damaged regularly. If DNA damage is not fixed quickly then these instructions are changed and the result is mutations - undesirable changes in DNA - that can cause the cell to become abnormal. This is essentially what causes cancer.

“However, cells are very good at recognising when DNA has become
damaged and they are good at finding DNA damage and repairing it. For
example, cells can quickly detect breakages in DNA and quickly fix these breaks. Many different factors help this process but we still haven’t identified all of them or exactly how this process works.

“With our findings we have unlocked a major part of the puzzle. We
discovered a new protein, FAN1, which is essential for the repair of DNA
breaks and other types of DNA damage.

“During repair of DNA damage, DNA `flaps’ are produced that must be
trimmed for repair to be completed. These leftover pieces of DNA get in
the way during DNA repair and that is why they have to be removed. FAN1 carries out this task, and in this sense it acts like a `molecular
scissors’.

“Our study shows that superfluous pieces of DNA are cut by FAN1.
Cells without FAN1 are unable to repair DNA breaks. Their DNA becomes irreversibly damaged and cells die. This underlines the
fundamental importance of FAN1.

“Now that we have identified FAN1 and the role it plays in repairing
DNA we can start to develop drugs that inhibit it. This may have a
significant effect in cancer, primarily in helping to greatly enhance
the efficacy of drugs used in chemotherapy treatments.

“It is pure coincidence that last year we discovered a separate group
of proteins called the SLX4 complex that acts as a `molecular toolkit’
for DNA repair and that are also required for trimming DNA during DNA
repair! The SLX4 complex is another promising drug target.

Most of the work on FAN1 was done by Craig MacKay, a PhD student in Dr Rouse’s team, with help from Anne-Cécile Déclais in the laboratory of
Professor David Lilley, also based in the College of Life Sciences at
Dundee.