McCaskie Group

Photo of Andrew McCaskie

Professor Andrew McCaskie

Regenerative therapies for bone and cartilage repair

Email: awm41@cam.ac.uk     |     Departmental Affiliation: Surgery, Division of Trauma and Orthopaedic Surgery

Laboratory: Addenbrooke's Hospital, Cambridge Biomedical Campus.

Research

Research Focus: The McCaskie Group’s aim is to develop innovative therapies for musculoskeletal disease, particularly in cartilage injury and osteoarthritis (OA) which affects over 8 million people in the UK alone. He is currently developing translational pathways for regenerative therapy in this area, linking laboratory research with clinical treatment, including clinical trials.

Laboratory research programmes focus on the opportunity to use adult stem/ stromal populations, chondrocytes and other relevant cell types either alone or with tissue engineering approaches to target early disease. The research also considers the mechanisms underlying joint repair and regeneration after injury. Translational and clinical programmes seek to use experimental medicine approaches, particularly focused on imaging and tissue analysis. The latter includes cell characterisation by phenotype, single cell and spatial transcriptomics.

Clinical trial work includes the evaluation of stromal populations as a cell therapy in osteoarthritis of the knee. As the only UK centre, the McCaskie Group were part of a European consortium evaluating the use of adipose derived populations (ADIPOA2) in a phase IIb prospective, multicentre, double-blind, randomized versus placebo trial funded by the H2020 Programme of the European Union (grant: ADIPOA-2: n°643809).

Relating to precision health, to best match advanced therapies such as cell therapy to patients with specific triggers for OA, they have been working to define distinct subpopulations. Using a machine learning approach, they recently identified key predictors of OA progression, such as patient-reported outcome measures (PROMs) and MRI features and developed web-based applications to facilitate understanding and visualisation of personalised predictions.

Using this translational and stratified approach we seek to develop new cell and molecular approaches for cartilage repair to offer new treatments to patients with musculoskeletal conditions like osteoarthritis.

Immunofluorescence image of a section through a joint illustrating the cellularity (nuclei stained blue) of the articular cartilage and meniscus.  The boundaries of the two apposing articular cartilage surfaces and the meniscal tissue are marked with yellow lines. 

 

Key Publications