February 2024 - PhD Success

Congratulations to Omar Alomair who has successfully defended his thesis and passed his PhD with minor corrections. Omar’s PhD was entitled ‘’ The Interplay Between Insulin/IGF-Axis and GRP78 in Colorectal Cancer Development and Response to Fluorouracil’.

Omar will be returning home to Saudi Arabia, and we are very sad to see him go, but wish him all the very best for the future.

January 2024 - new publication from our team

Congratulations to Emily Gill on the publication of her review entitled, ‘Current Bladder Cancer Treatment—The Need for Improvement", that has been published in IJMS as part of the Special Issue Molecular Research and Treatment of Urologic Cancer.

October 2023 – Grant success

We are delighted that our technician, Alfie Chambers, was awarded seed corn funding from the University of Bristol Cancer Research Fund (UCRF). This grant will be used by Alfie to investigate the link between Notch signalling and amyloid precursor protein in prostate cancer. Well done, Alfie!

September 2023 – Welcome to our new PhD student

We are delighted to welcome Omar Alkhatani to our team. Omar’s PhD will be focussed on investigating a potential role for PLEKHS1 in linking obesity, type 2 diabetes and cancer. Welcome to the team, Omar!

July 2023 – Masters Success

Huge congratulations to Zuzana Lickova who has passed her Masters degree. Zuzana’s thesis was entitled, ‘Investigating breast cancer progression in the context of deregulated cholesterol metabolism and determining a role for estrogen receptor beta’. We are very sad to see Zuzana go, but wish her all the very best in her career.

June 2023 – new publications from our team

Congratulations to Abigail Harland on the publication of her paper entitled, Insulin‐Like Growth Factor Binding Protein‐2 and Glucose Regulated Protein 78kDa: potential biomarkers affect prognosis in IDH‐wildtype glioblastoma patients. This study showed that, in glioblastoma, high IGFBP-2 paired with low GRP78 protein abundance was significantly associated with shorter survival time, and hence this inverse relationship may be a marker for adverse clinical prognosis.

Congratulations also to Kalina Biernacka on the publication of her article entitled Case report: Molecular characterisation of adipose-tissue derived cells from a patient with ROHHAD syndrome. This study aimed to better characterise adipose cells from a patient with rapid-onset obesity with hypothalamic dysfunction, hypoventilation, and autonomic dysregulation (ROHHAD) syndrome and showed the most up- and down-regulated genes in ROHHAD cells compared to control cells.

Following the publication of our study investigating a splice variant of the androgen receptor (AR-V7) in prostate cancer, the Bristol Biomedical Research Centre (BRC), which supported this work, have released this news article. Congratulations to everyone involved in this study!

May 2023 – Welcome to the new members of the team

We are delighted to welcome two new members to our team this month. Alfie Chambers is joining us as a part time technician and will primarily be working to maintain our prostate tissue biopsy bank and carry out validation experiments investigating some interesting targets identified through RNA sequencing.

We are also joined by Lily Hadfield who will be with us for 6 weeks whilst she finishes her MRes project looking at the effects of leptin in cancer.

May 2023 – Publication news

Congratulations to Kalina Biernacka on the acceptance of her manuscript entitled ‘A role for androgen receptor variant 7 in sensitivity to therapy: involvement of IGFBP-2 and FOXA1’ in Translational Oncology. This study investigated the role of an alternative splice variant of the androgen receptor in prostate cancer, showing that prostate cancer cells with this variant were more resistant to therapy and had a more aggressive phenotype, and that these effects may be mediated by IGFPB-2 and FOXA1.

April 2023 – PhD Success

Congratulations to Alaa Mohammedali who has successfully defended her thesis and passed her PhD with minor corrections. Alaa’s PhD was entitled ‘A novel role for IGFBP-2 in DNA repair in breast cancer cells’. Alaa will be returning home to Saudi Arabia and we are very sad to see her go, but wish her all the very best for her future.

March 2023 – Fellowship Awarded

We are delighted that Rachel Barker has been awarded a Career Acceleration Fellowship from Prostate Cancer UK. Rachel will be researching the inverse relationship between cancer and Alzheimer’s disease and investigating how processing of amyloid precursor protein impacts prostate cancer risk and progression. Rachel completed her PhD in Alzheimer’s disease research but since joining the Cancer Endocrinology Group, her focus has been on prostate cancer; this project will enable her to follow her passion for research in both areas and she hopes will ultimately lead to lasting benefit for men with prostate cancer.