Overview

Cohort: 4
PhD start date: October 2020

Melanoma is the deadliest form of skin cancer. With more than 16,000 cases annually, it is the fifth most common cancer in the UK.

Despite recent breakthroughs with treatments that harness the anti-tumour function of the immune system, only a limited proportion of advanced melanoma patients receive long-term benefit from these therapies, and half do not survive until 5 years.

Therefore, urgent progress is needed to improve our understanding of melanoma pathogenesis and the features that determine its sensitivity to immunotherapy.

My PhD aims to characterise the innate immune pathways that play a role in the pathogenesis of melanoma, and to discover ways of transforming immunologically ‘cold’ unresponsive melanomas to ‘hot’ T cell-inflamed tumours.

Key collaborators

• Professor Julia Newton-Bishop – University of Leeds
• Professor Paul Lorigan – University of Manchester

Specialty interest/techniques

I will use a range of high-throughput techniques, operating at the single-cell level, to characterise the innate immune pathways active in several cutting-edge mouse models of melanoma, with validation in human melanoma samples. 

Career aspirations

My career goal is to improve human health by combining medical practice with cutting edge hypothesis-driven research into disease mechanisms and treatment.

I hope to run my own molecular biology research group, and to combine this with an active clinical practice in the field of dermatology.

My career goal is to improve human health by combining medical practice with cutting edge hypothesis-driven research into disease mechanisms and treatment.

I hope to run my own molecular biology research group, and to combine this with an active clinical practice in the field of dermatology.

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