Episode 131 - Vivian Li - “I felt like the intestine is actually quite a beautiful system.”

StemCells@Lunch Digested

On today’s episode, Dr Vivian Li, group leader of the Stem Cell and Cancer Laboratory at the Francis Crick Institute, is interviewed by PhD student Elena Drudi. Vivian talks about her background in plant biotechnology, colon cancer research and working in Hans Clevers lab and her current research focus using human gut organoids to ask how stem cells are maintained in healthy guts, what happens when it goes wrong, and the Wnt signalling pathway’s role in this. She also talks about the future of engineering parts of the bowel to replace damaged and missing bowel. For more information on Vivian’s work check out the following link: https://www.crick.ac.uk/research/labs/vivian-li