Dr Matthew Seah
PhD, MSc (Edin/Oxon), MBChB (Edin), BMedSci (Hons) (Edin), SFHEA, MFSTEd, FRCSEd
Research Fellow
Herchel Smith Fellow in Medicine
Biography
Achieving a scholarship to attend Raffles Institution, Singapore, first taught me to engage in intellectual activity beyond the classroom and pursuits beyond the confines of the school. I later earned the rank of sergeant in the Singapore Army before reading Medicine at Edinburgh University in 2004 (intercalating in Neurosciences). I commenced my Orthopaedics surgical training in Scotland, and subsequently moved to Cambridge in 2015 for a NIHR Academic Clinical Fellowship, where I worked at Addenbrooke’s Hospital and the Division of Trauma and Orthopaedics. In 2018, I started my PhD at St John’s College. I am also a current member of the Musculoskeletal Disorders Research Advisory Group at Versus Arthritis.
Dr Seah is intermitting his Fellowship in academic year 2024/25.
Research
Osteoarthritis is a major cause of morbidity. While this results in enormous costs for healthcare systems, there remains, surprisingly, no effective intervention capable of regenerating damaged articular cartilage, and management continues to be focused on joint replacement for end-stage disease. There is consequently a need for a radical shift in strategies to manage early disease, which is likely to include cell-based regenerative therapies. This is where my research interests lie, together with the translation of cell therapies for clinical use. I work on new techniques to track mesenchymal stromal cells and their progeny in vivo, to understand the behaviour, dynamics, and heterogeneity of these cells. I also use single-cell approaches to build a landscape of the cell populations that exist in healthy and diseased contexts, so that we may begin to make treatments more personalised.