Georgie Lines completed her bachelor's degree (1st Class Honours) in Biomedical Science (with a year in industry) at Kings College London in 2016. Her year in industry was spent at The Drug Control Centre (KCL), where she analysed biological samples for the presence of prohibited substances. During this year Georgie worked to GLP standards and was involved in screening samples from the 2014 Commonwealth games. Following the completion of her degree, Georgie worked as a Research Assistant at the ARUK UCL Drug Discovery Institute from 2016-2018. As aa member of the screening and pharmacology team at the UCL DDI, Georgie was involved in a range of projects including:
Huntington’s Disease Project: This project is based on the mis-splicing of the Huntington gene RNA transcript, which produces a toxic exon 1 fragment thought to contribute to neurodegeneration in HD. Here Georgie miniaturized and validated a high throughput phenotypic screen to test a library of 250,000 unique compounds.
Alzheimer’s Disease Project (AD): This project is based on modulating the WNT signalling pathway in AD. Georgie developed a cell-based assay to detect small molecule inhibitors of a newly described protein that negatively regulates the WNT signalling pathway, which may be involved in synapse loss in AD.
Georgie is currently completing her PhD at UCL Queens Square Institute of Neurology under the supervision of Prof Selina Wray. Her project is focused on investigating tau proteostasis in development and disease using iPSC-neurons with MAPT mutations linked to FTD. Georgie is a BBRSE CASE student and has spent 4 weeks at AstraZeneca (Cambridge) for her industry placement. In addition to this Georgie has been accepted onto the UCL-Yale student exchange program. Here she will spend 3 months Studying at Yale under the supervision of Prof Mark Hochstrasser.