Our Spotlight Interview for this issue of the QUOD newsletter features Prof Sarah Richardson, who took time out to talk to us about her research and her role within QUOD.
Sarah Richardson is Professor of Cellular Biomedicine at the University of Exeter and Steve Morgan Foundation Grand Challenge Senior Research Fellow, specialising in the pathology of pancreatic diseases, particularly type 1 diabetes (T1D). Her career began studying Molecular Biology at Sheffield University before moving into cellular biology, and most of her profession has been spent studying why cells do or do not die under certain circumstances, as happens in T1D with the destruction of insulin-producing beta cells.
In 2006, she entered the field of T1D and pancreas tissue research under the mentorship of Prof Noel Morgan, working as a post-doc and collaborating with Prof Alan Foulis at Glasgow University, who compiled the world’s largest collection of pancreas samples from deceased patients at onset of T1D. When Prof Foulis retired, the biobank (now known as the Exeter Archival Diabetes Biobank) was transferred to Exeter, where Sarah has worked on it ever since. Her journey towards her full professorship, which she was awarded in 2024, has seen her achieve various fellowships. She feels incredibly lucky to be able to study the rare pancreas bioresource at Exeter and to dig into what happens in T1D in humans, as there are so few samples around the world. The scarcity of pancreas samples stems from the fact that pancreatic tissue can only be obtained after death. The pancreas cannot be safely biopsied due to its deep location in the abdomen and the risk of digestive enzymes leaking and causing complications.
Sarah believes it is just as important to study organs from individuals without disease as those with disease. She is conscious that “we can’t understand disease until we understand normal”; however, the shortage of pancreases available to researchers is a barrier to increasing our understanding of normal. Sarah and her team study pancreases from healthy donors as well as those with diabetes or other pancreatic diseases. Her research uses sophisticated staining and imaging platforms to interrogate pancreatic tissue and employs AI-assisted imaging technology to deeply examine tissue across the entire pancreas. Scanning tissue sections across the organ, they are able to perform detailed analyses of entire images that would not be possible using a microscope. These techniques enable analysis of changes in the architecture of the pancreatic tissue across the whole organ with disease, as well as during normal, healthy development or with ageing, allowing them to pick apart changes within the pancreas that may influence the clinical changes seen in patients.
Sarah is currently preparing a publication with Dr Christiana Lekka from her team, detailing the setup of a pancreas bioresource website that highlights the different collections of pancreases available globally, such as the Exeter Archival Diabetes Biobank in the UK, Network for Pancreatic Organ Donors with Diabetes (nPOD) in the USA, the Alberta Diabetes Institute IsletCore in Canada, as well as QUOD’s Whole Organ Pancreas Atlas. At present, there are approximately 2,250 pancreas samples with and without disease available to researchers. While this may sound like a lot, it is important to consider the different types of disease each may have, which limits the number of samples available for use for specific projects compared with the numbers that would be obtainable for other types of study, for example, genetic studies that examine hundreds of thousands of individuals. There are around 400–500 samples from pancreases with T1D available around the world, and, of these, there are fewer than 100 samples available from individuals close to onset of the disease, which are important for studying the underlying disease process. Given the rarity of these samples, Sarah feels incredibly lucky to have collaborated with so many people across the world to try to translate the work that is often done in lab-based studies, such as in cells or mouse models, into human-relevant tissue to confirm that targets or pathways that may play a role in disease are altered in human tissue.
In addition to her involvement with the Exeter Archival Diabetes Biobank, Sarah has collaborated with Prof James Shaw at Newcastle University to develop QUOD’s Whole Organ Pancreas Atlas. This unique resource allows researchers to access detailed macroscopic and microscopic images from across entire human pancreases. The QUOD-PANC pathology core takes routinely stained sections from 16 regions across the pancreas and her team put these through an AI-assisted image analysis pipeline to extract detailed tissue information. This enables research into how the endocrine part of the pancreas changes, and allows quantification of fibrosis and fat within the tissue, which can be linked to donor diseases and lifestyle factors. Feeding the information from the organs into the QUOD Atlas enables researchers to accurately select the donors they want to use and ensures the best samples are used for studies.
Sarah describes it is fabulous to have this type of initiative in the UK. What makes it unique and special is the way that they are collecting tissue from regions right across the pancreas in a systematic way that allows pancreases from different individuals of different ages and with different diseases to be studied. Importantly, being able to examine the whole pancreas could shed light on diseases that may occur within different areas of the organ. This enables researchers to build a picture of the architecture right the way through the entire organ in a way that few other biobanks can offer.
Since she began working in the field in 2006, Sarah has seen a huge shift in our understanding of T1D. In 2025, teplizumab, the world’s first immunotherapy for T1D that delays onset in people at risk of developing the disease, was approved. This is opening the floodgates for more immunotherapies to come through as previously insulin was the only treatment for the disease, meaning the condition was only treated after it had developed. The work she and her team are involved with has helped to cement the need to develop these immunotherapies and now focuses on guiding their next phase. Her research could also inform emerging stem-cell-derived islet therapies. Sarah describes this as an exciting time for T1D research, noting the UK’s leadership in general population screening strategies and disease understanding, and with bioresources such as the Exeter Archival Diabetes Biobank and QUOD really helping to drive a lot of these strategies. While current new therapies aim to delay T1D, in future, it may be possible to prevent the disease.
A typical week for Sarah is filled with a diverse mix of activities, including one-to-one meetings with team members, writing and data analysis, planning experiments, collaboration meetings with people across the world, team meetings, lectures, conferences, and travelling. Her passion and enthusiasm for the work she does is clearly visible. Team science is important to Sarah and she relishes working with as many people as she can, helping to facilitate their research, often working to put a small piece of the jigsaw into the puzzle, which could be the icing on the cake in terms of translating lab findings to human relevance. She feels “lucky and blessed to work with many collaborators around the world” and describes it as a real team effort!
When not busy working, Sarah loves walking her Australian Kelpie, Mick (pictured). She can often be found walking round her local woods dictating or thinking through talks or presentations, and brainstorming how to communicate latest findings in an accessible way. She enjoys being in the outdoors, where she can allow her creative juices to flow, and says some of her best thinking time happens during her outings with Mick. She isn’t entirely sure what Mick makes of it, but perhaps he is taking it all in!