Head of Department of Surgery; Professor of Orthopaedic Surgery
Email: awm41@cam.ac.uk
Biography/Research Interests
Professor McCaskie is the Professor of Orthopaedic Surgery and Head of the Department of Surgery at the University of Cambridge. He is the Director of the Tissue Engineering Centre & Regenerative Therapies Centre, which brings together many centres; University of Cambridge, Newcastle University, the University of Aberdeen, Keele University/the Robert Jones and Agnes Hunt Hospital NHS Foundation Trust in Oswestry and the University of York. Funded by a core grant of £2.4 million over the first five years from Arthritis Research UK (now Versus Arthritis), the Centre grant was recently renewed (£1.9M) until 2021. The centre brings together leading clinicians, engineers and biologists from research and clinical groups and to develop regenerative therapies for people with Osteoarthritis. Professor McCaskie led the Smart Step programme (£1.1M) as part of Stage II UK Regenerative Medicine Platform and is a co-investigator in the recently established UK Regenerative Medicine Platform Hub; Engineered cell environment (£5.1M). His clinical interest is lower limb, particularly hip disease in young patients and he aims to link my research to the clinic e.g. cell therapy trial for knee arthritis (ADIPOA2 EU €5.9M only UK partner). The overarching aim is to develop innovative therapies for musculoskeletal disease, particularly in Osteoarthritis (OA) which affects around 8 million people in the UK alone. Laboratory research programmes focus on the opportunity to use adult stem/stromal populations, along with other relevant cell types (haematopoietic and chondrocyte) either alone or with tissue engineering approaches to target early disease. Research also considers the mechanisms of joint destruction relevant to repair. Translational and clinical programmes seek to use stratified and experimental medicine approaches, particularly focused on imaging and tissue analysis during cartilage repair surgery. The latter will include cell characterisation by phenotype and single cell analysis to understand the role played by cell therapies in the repair of joint tissues.
He is one of the three editors of Bailey and Love’s Short Practice of Surgery 27th Edition and is the Director of the Academic Foundation Program in Cambridge and initiated the transplant and regeneration theme.
Key Publications
Steinberg J, Brooks RA, Southam L, Bhatnagar S, Roumeliotis TI, Hatzikotoulas K, Zengini E, Wilkinson JM, Choudhary JS, McCaskie AW and Zeggini E. Widespread epigenomic, transcriptomic and proteomic differences between hip osteophytic and articular chondrocytes in osteoarthritis. Rheumatology (Oxford). 2018 Aug 1;57(8):1481-1489
MacKay JW, Kapoor G, Driban JB, Lo GH, McAlindon TE, Toms AP, McCaskie AW, Gilbert FJ. Association of subchondral bone texture on magnetic resonance imaging with radiographic knee osteoarthritis progression: data from the Osteoarthritis Initiative Bone Ancillary Study. European Radiology 2018 Apr 2. [Epub ahead of print]
Zengini E, Hatzikotoulas K, Tachmazidou I, Steinberg J, Hartwig FP, Southam L, Hackinger S, Boer CG, Styrkarsdottir U, Gilly A, Suveges D, Killian B, Ingvarsson T, Jonsson H, Babis GC, McCaskie A, Uitterlinden AG, van Meurs JBJ, Thorsteinsdottir U, Stefansson K, Davey Smith G, Wilkinson JM, Zeggini E. Genome-wide analyses using UK Biobank data provide insights into the genetic architecture of osteoarthritis. Nature Genetics 2018 Apr;50(4):549-558
Palmer AJR, Ayyar Gupta V, Fernquest S, Rombach I, Dutton SJ, Mansour R, Wood S, Khanduja V, Pollard TCB, McCaskie AW, Barker KL, Andrade TJMD, Carr AJ, Beard DJ, Glyn-Jones S; FAIT Study Group. Arthroscopic hip surgery compared with physiotherapy and activity modification for the treatment of symptomatic femoroacetabular impingement: multicentre randomised controlled trial. BMJ 2019 Jan 7;364:l185.
Zeggini E., Panoutsopoulou K., Southam L, Rayner NW, Day-Williams AG, Lopes MC, . . . Loughlin J. (2012). Identification of new susceptibility loci for osteoarthritis (arcOGEN): A genome-wide association study. The Lancet 380(9844), 815-823.
