University of Nottingham: Dr James Dixon · UK Regenerative Medicine Platform

Professor Kevin Shakesheff, University of Nottingham
Director

Prof Molly Stevens, Imperial College London
Director

Molly Stevens is Professor of Biomedical Materials and Regenerative Medicine and the Research Director for Biomedical Material Sciences in the Institute of Biomedical Engineering at Imperial College. She graduated from Bath University and was awarded a PhD from the University of Nottingham in 2001. Molly conducted post-doctoral studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology ahead of joining Imperial in 2004.

Molly’s research uses transformative bioengineering approaches to overcome severe limitations in current materials in biosensing and regenerative medicine. A key focus is on understanding and engineering the biomaterial interface using innovative designs and state of the art materials characterisation methods and using highly multidisciplinary approaches from bioengineers, material scientists, chemists, surgeons and biologists.

James Dixon
I am a Stem cell and molecular biologist. I gained my Honours degree from Edinburgh (BSc Genetics) and my PhD from Imperial College, London under the supervision of Vasso Episkopou at the MRC Clinical Sciences Centre. In 2008 I took up a Postdoctoral research post at the University of Nottingham Spin-out company EvoCell and in 2009 transferred to the Wolfson STEM centre at the University of Nottingham within the Tissue Engineering group of Kevin Shakesheff. I am named inventor on several patents and am presently leading research to develop intracellular delivery technologies for the UKRMP Acellular hub.
My interests include regenerative medicine applications for a peptide delivery system I developed within the Tissue engineering group, University of Nottingham; and fundamental stem cell biology research.
My current goals are to:
• Design and manufacture of intracellular delivery systems to control cell behaviour
• Devise cell-type specific delivery systems for therapeutic molecules
• Investigate potential applications of this technology for differentiating human stem cells
• Develop in vivo delivery and triggered delivery systems for therapeutics
• Improve architectural control in engineered tissues from human stem cells
Publications:
Dixon, J.E., Shah, D.A., Rogers, C., Hall, S., Weston, N., McNally, D., Denning, C. & Shakesheff, K.M. (2014). Combined hydrogels that switch human pluripotent stem cells from self-renewal to differentiation. PNAS. In press (Impact factor: 9.7)
Kelly C.E., Thymiakou, E. ,Dixon J.E., Tanaka, S., Godwin, J. & Episkopou, V. (2013) Rnf165/Ark2C Enhances BMP-Smad Signaling to Mediate Motor Axon Extension. PLoS Biology (Impact factor: 12.7)

Matsa, E., Dixon, J.E., Medway, C., Georgiou, O., Patel, M.J., Morgan, K., Kemp, P.J., Staniforth, A., Mellor & Denning. C. (2013). Allele-specific RNA interference rescues the long-QT syndrome phenotype in human-induced pluripotency stem cell cardiomyocytes. European Heart Journal (Impact factor: 14.1)
Paik, I., Shakesheff, K.M., & Dixon, J.E. (2012). Rapid micropatterning of cell lines and human pluripotent cells on Elastic membranes. Biotech. Bioeng. (Impact factor: 3.7)
Dixon, J.E., Dick, E., Shakesheff, K.M. & Denning, C. (2011). Directed differentiation of human embryonic stem cells to interrogate the cardiac gene regulatory network. Mol. Ther. 19(9):1695-703 (Impact factor: 7.0)
Bayoussef, Z., Dixon, J. E., Stolnik, S., & Shakesheff, K.M. (2011). Aggregation promotes cell viability, proliferation,and differentiation in an in vitro model of injection cell therapy. J Tis Eng Regen Med. (Impact factor: 2.8)
Allegrucci, C., Rushton, M.D., Dixon, J.E., Sottile, V., Shah, M., Kumari, R., Watson, S., Alberio, R., & Johnson, A.D. (2011). Epigenetic Reprogramming of Breast Cancer cells with Oocyte extracts. Molecular Cancer, 10(1). 7. (Impact factor: 5.3)
Dixon, J. E., et al. (2010). Axolotl Nanog Activity in Mouse Embryonic Stem cells demonstrates Ground State Pluripotency is conserved from Urodele Amphibians to Mammals. Development, 137, 2973-2980. (Impact factor: 6.1)
Mavrakis K.J., Andrew R.L., Lee K.L., Petropoulou, C., Dixon J.E., et al. (2007). Arkadia enhances Nodal/TGF-beta signaling by coupling phospho-Smad2/3 activity and turnover. PLoS Biol. 5:e67 (Impact factor: 12.7)