Receive advanced academic and technical training within one of our designated pathways and become a highly skilled, multidisciplinary biomedical scientist, ready to make a difference in the rapidly evolving field of biomedicine across academia, healthcare and industry.

Course description

Biomedical science research aims to understand how the human body functions both in health and disease, and strives to develop treatments that can improve and save lives.

Through your choice of specialist pathway in either Stem Cell and Regenerative Medicine or Cell Biology and Drug Development, this MSc offers the combination of a flexible and specialist module choice to equip you with the knowledge, technical skills and professional attributes to lead innovation in the biomedicine sector that interests you.

Our Stem Cell and Regenerative Medicine pathway is designed to train our students in current academic and practical aspects of stem cell biology and regenerative medicine. You will develop practical skills in cell and 3D tissue culture, genome editing techniques and manipulation of animal models used in stem cell biology.

Students are also offered a choice of lecture modules in the principles of regenerative medicine and tissue engineering, modelling human disease and dysfunction, stem cell and cancer biology to reinforce their theoretical knowledge in the field of regenerative medicine.

Our Cell Biology and Drug Development pathway is for students that would like to understand the cell and animal models of disease and techniques that underpin the drug discovery industry. Practical modules will allow you to develop skills from robotics and automation to cell culture, animal models of disease and biomedical assays.

Our lecture module choices include subjects such as cellular mechanisms, membrane receptors, cancer pathways, cell signalling, sensory neuroscience, the analysis of biotechnology and pharmaceutical industry practices and current trends in new therapeutics.

In both pathways, you will study a core collection of modules focussing on the development of your scientific, analytical and critical thinking skills. Here we will teach you how to present your science in writing and in other media, use the R statistical analysis software, critically interpret scientific literature and understand the role of ethics in research.

The most substantial part of the course is your research project, where you will spend up to five months embedded within one of our internationally recognised research laboratories. Here you'll be working closely with world-leading academics and scientists and using our state-of-the-art facilities to perform your own cutting-edge biomedicine research project.

The School of Biosciences is home to state-of-the-art light microscopy and electron microscopy facilities, a purpose-built zebrafish facility, a fly facility, and proteomics and single cell omics facilities and you may be working in our Bateson Centre, where studies of model organisms are enabling researchers to understand human disease pathways at the physiological and molecular level.

Example past research projects include:

The use of cell penetrating peptides in Ovarian Cancer.
In vitro generation of cardiac neural crest from human pluripotent stem cells
Characterisation of subpopulations of otic progenitors derived from human Embryonic Stem Cells (hESCs)
Elucidating the role of SNAP29 in endocytic trafficking using CRISPR/Cas9 based approaches
Understanding the relationship between heart tube rotation and extracellular matrix regionalization during cardiac looping in transgenic zebrafish models.

Please see our University website for the most up-to-date course information.