Olivia Allen, a PhD student in Prof Martin Knight's group in the Centre for Predictive in vitro Models, has published a review paper entitled 'Air Pollution and Osteoporosis' in the leading journal Current Osteoporosis Reports, highlighting the emerging link between air pollutants and bone degeneration.

Olivia is just starting her BBSRC LIDo-funded PhD, collaborating with Dr Stefaan Verbruggen, to develop organ-on-a-chip models examining the role of air pollution-induced inflammation on bone health.

Recent studies have shown a concerning link between air pollution and a nine-fold increase in risk of osteoporosis, with severe bone loss causing debilitating fractures. This is a significant challenge for health systems, as the global population is rapidly ageing, and mortality increases substantially in elderly patients in the years after a hip or vertebral fracture. Most importantly, the global population is increasingly urban and exposed to these pollutants, with the UN and WHO predicting 68% of the global population residing in cities by 2050.

This gap in knowledge presents a population-wide risk of premature bone fracture, resulting in a clear and urgent need for new predictive tools to inform personalised primary care. Olivia's work at the Centre for Predictive in vitro Models will help to address this challenge by building organ-on-a-chip models to predict the effects of air pollutants on bone health.

Olivia's early results were also recently presented at the BioMedEng24 conference held at Queen Mary.

"She's done amazingly to get a paper published this quickly,” said Dr Verbruggen.