Biomedical Science

Build on your undergraduate knowledge and begin advanced training to become a highly-skilled, multi-disciplinary biomedical scientist, ready to make significant contributions to biomedical research in the industrial and academic sector.

Course description

This 12-month course has been designed to build on your knowledge and skills from your undergraduate degree, training you in high-level scientific skills, ready for you to make a difference in the biomedicine sector.

Biomedical science is about deepening our understanding of the human body in health and disease, helping to develop treatments that can save and improve lives. Because of the broad nature of the subject, this research-led masters course will expose you to a wide range of both practical and lecture modules spanning cell biology, developmental biology, neuroscience, and stem cell biology. This breadth gives you the flexibility to choose to study the modules that interest you most, mastering key techniques as you specialise in an area aligned to your career goals.

During your practical modules, you’ll receive training in the techniques that are used in biomedical research including the study of model organisms, advanced tissue culture techniques, protein detection methodologies, and microscopy. You’ll learn how to recreate and model human disease in the laboratory in order to study the underlying molecular mechanisms, and how to visualise, in real-time, how embryos develop into fully-formed, complex organisms before using these to study our own development.

Throughout your degree, you may have the opportunity to use our leading facilities to further enhance your training in the analysis of biological systems, from the molecular and cellular level, to tissues and whole organisms. In the School of Biosciences we’re also home to state-of-the-art light microscopy and electron microscopy facilities, a purpose-built zebrafish facility, a fly facility, drug and RNAi screening facilities, and proteomics and single cell omics facilities. You could even be working in our Bateson Centre, where studies of model organisms are enabling researchers to understand human disease pathways.

Your theoretical lecture modules will teach you about topics including the clinical use of stem cells, cancer biology, diseases associated with ion channel mutations, and the development of novel therapeutics. You'll also begin training to gain the transferable skills that every professional scientist needs, such as scientific writing and presentation skills, research ethics, statistical analysis and the use of R, and scientific literature analysis.

The biggest part of the course is the research project. You’ll spend six months embedded within one of our internationally recognised research laboratories, developing your research skills in an area of biomedical science that matches your future career aspirations. We offer a wide range of projects where you could be working in our Wolfson Light Microscopy Facility, investigating the subcellular location of disease proteins, carrying out zebrafish CRISPR knock-outs, or working within our RNAi Screening Facility using pharmaceutical industry automation methods for drug screening. Our research groups have transplanted stem cells to restore hearing in mammals, and offered hope in the search for treatments for motor neuron disease. It’s research like this that you’ll be able to contribute to at Sheffield.

Example past research projects include:

• The effect of therapeutic ultrasound on matrix deposition and organization during skin healing and scarring
• Establishment of an in vitro model for cystic fibrosis using organ on chip technology
• Investigating Human Biology of SARS-CoV-2 Protein ORF7a in Inducing Host Cell Death

Often, research carried out by our MSc students during their MSc research projects forms the basis of publications in peer-reviewed journals. Here’s an example past paper including student authors:

• Walters, K., Sarsenov, R., Too, W.S. et al. Comprehensive functional profiling of long non-coding RNAs through a novel pan-cancer integration approach and modular analysis of their protein-coding gene association networks. BMC Genomics 20, 454 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1186/s12864-019-5850-7