PhD Scholarships, Beatson Institute for Cancer Research, UK (2017)

Pancreatic cancer is a significant health problem and kills ~340,000 people worldwide every year. Survival has remained virtually unchanged for the last 50 years, and even now, most therapies are ineffective. Improvements in our understanding of the disease are vital to identify novel targets for therapy.

Pancreatic cancer is characterised by a dense microenvironment of fibroblasts, immune cells, and extracellular matrix proteins. Crosstalk between tumour cells and this microenvironment can affect tumour cell survival, proliferation, metabolism, migration & invasion, immune response, and response to chemotherapy. The overall aim of the Pancreatic Cancer UK Future Leaders Academy is to investigate aspects of this complex situation in vivo, with the goal of finding potentially clinically targetable pathways, and developing future leaders in the field of pancreatic cancer research. The project themes are:

- The role of γδ T cells in pancreatic cancer (Dr Seth Coffelt)
- Investigating strategies to optimise immunotherapy in pancreatic cancer (Dr Jen Morton)
- Exploiting MYC-induced vulnerabilities in pancreatic cancer (Dr Daniel Murphy)
- Targeting tumour metabolism in pancreatic cancer (Prof Owen Sansom)

Further details:
http://www.beatson.gla.ac.uk