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Appointment
- Student
- Div of Medicine
- Faculty of Medical Sciences
Biography
I am a medical student on the MBPhD programme at UCL and I am based at UCL Cancer Institute within the Cell Communication Laboratory led by my primary supervisor, Dr Chris Tape. I am also working at the UCL Great Ormond Street Institute of Child Health under my secondary supervisor, Dr Jonathan Fisher.
Research Summary
The objective of my PhD is to explore human γδ T cells as a novel biotherapeutic for the treatment of colorectal cancer (CRC). I am using cytometry time-of-flight (CyTOF) to perform 126-plex multivariate experiments on patient-derived CRC organoids (PDOs) co-cultured with various combinations of colonic fibroblasts, cancer-associated fibroblasts, macrophages and γδ T cells. This will allow the characterisation of how γδ T cells kill CRC PDOs and to what extent this killing is regulated by constituents of the tumour microenvironment co-cultures. Furthermore, I will also be using this custom CyTOF platform to investigate how various therapies currently in the clinic modulate γδ T cell activity, with the intention of improving anti-PDO efficacy. Furthermore, I engineer γδ T cells to produce their own cytokine support as well as antibodies against tumour antigens to facilitate the process of antibody-dependent cellular cytotoxicity.
