Rishma Shah, a specialist registrar at the Eastman Dental Institute, recently presented her research into investigating the use of a degradable glass fibre scaffold to engineer human facial muscle in the laboratory environment, at a House of Commons reception. For her PhD, Dr Shah is researching tissue engineering with a particular focus on human facial skeletal muscle. This is to help patients who are missing muscle tissue as a result of trauma, deformity or surgery as an alternative to the surgical transfer of muscle tissue. Cells from a patient's tissue can be grown in a laboratory and then implanted into the patient's face to replace missing tissue. In their early stages of development, the cells need another material to form a scaffold on which they can grow. The ideal is for the scaffold material to degrade by the time the cells are able to support their own growth and development. This reduces the chance of rejection when the tissue is implanted into the patient. Frank Dobson was one of the guests as he is the MP for Holborn and St Pancras, the constituency for the Eastman Dental Institute. Dr Shah said afterwards that what made her research particularly interesting was that although it related to the facial region, it could be extrapolated to other areas in the human body. Pictured above, Dr Shah (left) with MP Frank Dobson.