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Artificial Blood Vessels for Thrombosis, Endothelial Modelling, and Artificial Intelligence Simulation (ARTEMIS)
Working with Dr Simon Calaminus (Hull York Medical School), I secured around £2.8m from the Medical Research Council (MRC) in November 2025. This grant will support a four-year project aiming to build a novel high-throughput vascular model system for thrombosis research without animal models. I will lead the work package involving mathematical modelling and AI, which will begin at the halfway mark of the project.
To gain foundational knowledge for ARTEMIS, I have completed smaller projects.
Platelet Proteomes
Platelets are small blood cells that play a key role in blood clotting (haemostasis). On the other hand, uncontrolled platelet activation could result in thrombosis, the formation of a blood clot inside a blood vessel, which obstructs the flow of blood through the circulatory system. Multiple stimulatory and inhibitory signalling pathways interact within a platelet to enable it to adapt to a changing extracellular environment. For example, its proteome may change in response to oxidative stresses.
In diabetics, platelets are known to be hyper-responsive and responsible for cardiovascular diseases such as myocardial infarction, stroke, or peripheral tissue ischemia. In the autumn trimester in 2023, Shaon Biswas conducted his MSc dissertation research (AI and Data Science), supervised by me and Dr Giordano Pula (Hull York Medical School).
He used the Enrichr library, the KEGG database, and the UniProt database to identify the platelet proteins associated with cardiovascular complications in a proteomic dataset pertaining to 23 diabetic (type 2) patients and 24 controls. Using this list of proteins as his reference, he combined standard differential expression analysis with protein-protein network analysis (STRING database), feature importance analysis (random forest classification), clustering, principal component analysis, and association rule learning to identify novel platelet protein biomarkers of cardiovascular complications in diabetics.