Dr. Andrea Townsend-Nicholson

The Scientific American article Tissue-Regeneration Matrix Could Be Spun from Cell-Size Nanothreads said

Suwan Jayasinghe has shown in the past that the same technology used in ink-jet printers can spray out living cells and thereby potentially allow scientists to print new tissue. Now he has refined the technique down to the smallest scale, using electrospinning to weave polymer nanofibers no bigger than the cells they encase — and doing the constituent cells no harm. The process could enable the creation of living microfibers for such medical applications as creating scaffolds for the regrowth of damaged tissue.
 
Jayasinghe and his colleague Andrea Townsend-Nicholson of University College London partnered to test the ability of cells to form a thread with the polymer and survive the electrical fields necessary to create it. The polymer in question — medical-grade poly(dimethylsiloxane) — does not conduct electricity well but is extremely viscous. The two researchers created a needle-within-a-needle system, in which living brain cells in a medium flow through the inner needle and the polymer flows around it via an outer needle. By applying an electrical field of roughly 9.5 kilovolts, the researchers stretch a droplet of the viscous polymer into a superfine thread no wider than the cells themselves using the polymer’s inherent electrostatic repulsion.

Dr. Andrea Townsend-Nicholson earned her Bachelor of Science degree in Molecular Genetics and Molecular Biology, with a Major in Zoology and (somehow) a Minor in Religion, from the University of Toronto in 1986. She subsequently studied at the Laboratoire de Génétique Moléculaire des Eucaryotes (LGME), in Strasbourg France, investigating the establishment of the dorsoventral polarity axis in Drosophila melanogaster. She earned her doctorate in Cellular and Molecular Biology from the Université Louis Pasteur in 1990.
 
From 1991 to 1996, she moved from transcriptional studies to cell signalling, studying mammalian G protein-coupled receptors as a postdoctoral fellow in the Neurobiology Division of the Garvan Institute of Medical Research (Sydney, Australia). During this time, she cloned and characterized several adenosine receptor subtypes and learned about the benefits of wide-brimmed hats and factor 50 sunscreen.
 
Having started her research career at University College (University of Toronto) in Canada, she is now at University College London, where she was appointed as a member of academic staff in the Department of Biochemistry & Molecular Biology in 2001, following three and a half years of postdoctoral study in the Department of Anatomy & Developmental Biology and eighteen months as a British Heart Foundation Intermediate Research Fellow in the Department of Physiology.
 
Andrea coauthored Coexpression of Rat P2X₂ and P2X₆ Subunits in Xenopus Oocytes, Heteromultimeric P2X_1/2 Receptors Show a Novel Sensitivity to Extracellular pH, Antagonism of ATP responses at P2X receptor subtypes by the pH indicator dye, Phenol red, Selective expression of purinoceptor cP2Y₁ suggests a role for nucleotide signalling in development of the chick embryo, Molecular cloning, functional characterization and possible cooperativity between the murine P2X4 and P2X4a receptors, and Metabotropic receptors for ATP and UTP: exploring the correspondence between native and recombinant nucleotide receptors.