In memory of Val Smith
We would like to take this opportunity to publicly thank and commemorate Val Smith, Warwick alumna and Benefactor who sadly passed away in 2015.
Val got in touch a few years ago to discuss leaving a legacy to medical research, as she had studied here many years ago and worked as a Community Clinical Tutor with the Medical Student programme. Val was particularly interested in medical research as one of her relatives had Polymyositis and Schoenberg Syndrome, and she wanted specifically to support research into autoimmune diseases.
Val met with Professor Naila Rabbani here, who has devoted her career to investigating disease mechanisms including arthritis, an autoimmune disease, when immune systems attack healthy cells causing symptoms like fatigue, muscle aches and fever.
Val’s donation is helping Naila’s team at the University of Warwick to take their work a step further. Naila (pictured above) says:
“It was a real pleasure to meet Val - I remember it like it was yesterday; she was such a vibrant woman who cared keenly about patient care, and especially about her relative. I was deeply surprised and saddened to hear that she’d passed away, and felt for her family. I remember her saying that one of the challenging difficulties her family member may face is arthritis, and we talked about the project I’m working on right now, detecting arthritis early on using biomarkers in the blood.
As you may know, at the moment there is no biochemical test for arthritis. You can only use X-rays or MRI, and those only work once the disease has advanced to the point where you can’t tackle it through lifestyle changes anymore. Our work is going to offer hope to patients in future by offering another sort of test.
"Val’s legacy will take our work one step further, helping us take our research from bench to bedside."
We recently discovered that by looking at blood samples, there were specific markers which showed up very early when arthritis was developing; and that by looking at proteins and antibodies, we could also tell the type - whether it was osteoarthritis or rheumatoid arthritis. That was an amazing discovery, and there was massive media coverage when we first released this news. Val’s legacy will take our work one step further, helping us take our research from bench to bedside. Our group is uniquely placed to do this biomarker research, because we’re the only group in the world who can measure comprehensively all types of damaged markers.
We’re going to find ways of measuring just how far the arthritis has developed through biomarkers, and work on getting these tests out for general use. Our old test took a few days to complete through labs, and we’ve now developed a new filtering method which gives us even more sensitive results in just a few hours, which is wonderful news.
"We will help patients tackle arthritis early on before they even develop symptoms."
In time, we will help patients tackle arthritis early on before they even develop symptoms, when simple lifestyle choices can make a huge difference. Crucially we will also be able to test new drugs as for the first time we’ll be able to measure their impact on those biomarkers. We’re applying these principles to our work in cancer research too, and hope to offer hope to many people in the future.
My hope is that one day; people will be able to take very simple, cheap and routine tests which will show autoimmune issues early on so that they can tackle them right away. We’ll be thanking Val posthumously in all our publications, and we’re glad to have the chance to thank her here too. She was such a personal inspiration and through her kindness and foresight, she’ll make a real difference to our work and what we can accomplish.”
"Thank you Val."
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