6 July 2026
Dr Ronak Ved is an MRC Clinical Research Fellow with the Advanced Neurotherapies Centre and a Neurosurgery registrar based at the University Hospital of Wales.
He regularly cares for patients who have suffered a Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI) which is a leading cause of death and disability in Wales, the UK, and worldwide.
Since the pathophysiology of TBI is still not fully understood, treatment options for these patients are limited. This is, in part, also due to a prior reliance upon animal models of head injury to study TBI, which whilst important, come with significant limitations and ethical concerns.
Dr Ved’s work, performed at and supported by the ANTC and the Rhiannon Jade Smith Memorial Trust, could help to progress the search for more effective treatments for brain trauma patients, and streamline pathways for drug development and subsequent progress to human clinical trials. It may also help to reduce some of the previous reliance upon ethically challenging, and more expensive, animal testing within the research field of TBI.
Dr Ved’s method
Dr Ved utilised a novel weight-drop, human brain tissue, petri-dish based model of TBI, developed by our human tissue team at the Advanced Neurotherapies Centre, to assess the impacts of trauma upon human brain cells.
Using resources and tissue at the ANTC, alongside support he obtained from a Medical Research Council Clinical Research Fellowship Award, Dr Ved designed a series of experiments using this model to investigate human brain cell responses to a blunt force injury.
He then identified a specific cell signalling pathway which, when manipulated, markedly improved human brain cell survival after traumatic injury.
Image shows: microscopic image of a human brain immune cell (Microglial cell: Green periphery, purple centre) expressing the neuroinflammatory protein, HMGB1 (Red) after being exposed to a weight drop injury in the lab.
We’d like to congratulate Ronak on successfully defending his viva based on the work above in April 2026.
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