Our trustee Dr Fiona Stewart reflects on the projects and achievements carried out by our Clinical Scientific Advisory Committee (CSAC) during the past year and shares their plans for 2024.
CSAC consists of members of our Board of Trustees and the MPS Society’s Patient Advocacy team. These members come from medical, healthcare or research backgrounds from a broad range of disciplines and perspectives to consider research applications each year.
Hello everyone and welcome to your CSAC update!
Well, it has been a very exciting and busy time for CSAC. We were thrilled to have Professor Derralynn Hughes and Professor Simon Heales join Professor Bryan Winchester, Sophie Thomas and myself on CSAC.
Our latest good news is that Dr Simon Jones has also agreed to join our committee.
I hope you will agree that this gives us great depth and breadth of knowledge and experience.
We have been assessing grant applications and making some awards. We were also delighted to see that some of the projects that had been delayed by Covid are now up and running.
It was great to hear that Professor Uma Ramaswami's work which we helped fund, has been accepted as a poster at WORLD 2024 and we were very proud to hear that one of our awardees won a prize at the British Inherited Metabolic Disease Group meeting for best presentation of papers presented.
This year also saw the first award of a summer studentship funded by the Christine Lavery Memorial Fund to mark 40 years of the MPS Society, to commemorate Christine’s dedication to research, and to hopefully inspire interest from the up-and-coming generation.
On October 10th, we held our first virtual CSAC open day.
We felt it was very important that our members and other interested parties were able to see who the members of CSAC are and to gain an idea of what our function is.
I hope everyone was interested to see how much money had been awarded to support important work over the years, including the appointment of a young Dr Ed Wraith to his first consultant post! Don't worry if you missed it, you can catch up with the recording of the webinar.
Recently, we have been involved in discussions with clinicians and pharma companies regarding different projects and trials. Some of us will also be attending WORLD in February. One of our next plans is to hold another CSAC event showcasing some of the work which we have supported. These are exciting, though challenging times, and CSAC will aim to continue to provide both advice and support to the MPS Society and RDRP.
CSAC is ready to work hard in the new year, as we are open to applications from 8 January until 28 March, and will hopefully be able to help fund some more excellent projects.
I would like to thank Harriet Clayton, CSAC Secretariat, for all her hard work keeping everything running smoothly. I'd also like to thank my other CSAC colleagues, most of whom, unlike me, have to hold down jobs as well as carrying out their CSAC responsibilities.
Merry Christmas to Everyone!
Fiona
