The following is an update from Professor Chris Jones at the ICR.
The last few months have seen our lab now having two Rudy A Menon Foundation-funded PhD students, at very different points on their research journey.
Shauna Crampsie started with us four years ago, and has worked through Covid and extended stays in our collaborating labs in Boston and Rome to produce an incredibly impressive body of work. For the first time, she has been able to delve into the make-up of Gliomatosis Cerebri (GC) tumour samples to unravel the different cell types that are present, how they are organised, and what makes them distinct from other brain tumours. She has identified a number of possible leads for what causes these cells to spread so widely throughout the brain, a key feature of GC that makes them so hard to treat. Due to the restrictions placed upon all our work during Covid, the ICR has agreed to extend her thesis submission deadline, so Shauna is currently in the final stages of writing up her work for examination early in the new year. This has really been a remarkable achievement, and we are all proud of what Shauna has managed to accomplish.
Rita Pereira, on the other hand, has just begun her student life in the lab. She already has a lot of knowledge and experience, having worked with us in a technical role for a couple of years, so has really been able to hit the ground running as she switches her focus to GC. Her project is taking up one of the key elements of our earlier work with Shauna, and the large European collaboration with the SIOPE brain tumour working group. Here, we have found a substantial proportion of GC cases to be associated with alterations in a gene called EGFR. This is an ‘old’ target which is beginning to receive a lot of renewed interest in brain tumours again. Whilst previous clinical trials with treatments aimed against this gene had not shown much promise in the past, now we have much better drugs, and a clearer idea of which patients may benefit the most – this includes GC, as well as another paediatric tumour type that spreads through a different part of the brain. Rita’s project is to make models of these types of tumour in the lab, and test a variety of cutting-edge new treatment strategies in order to work out the most promising route forward to the clinic. We are excited to see the progress she will make over the next four years, and to her providing updates on her progress as she gets going in the lab.
As always, thank you to The Rudy A Menon Foundation for your ongoing support and tireless commitment to helping us achieve our mission of making the discoveries that defeat cancer.
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