Email: portico-services@ucl.ac.uk
Help Desk: http://www.ucl.ac.uk/ras/portico/helpdesk
- Student
- Div of Medicine
- Faculty of Medical Sciences
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.
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.