Cancer Bioinformatics: Connecting Cell-Cell Signalling in the Tumour Microenvironment

Tumours comprise mutated cancer cells, stromal fibroblasts, and multiple immune cells. While each of these cell-types can contribute towards cancer, how they interact to support tumours is poorly understood. To fully comprehend multicellular diseases like cancer, we must study how different cell-types communicate.

The Cell Communication Lab at UCL Cancer Institute investigates how cells interact. Specifically, we use custom single-cell technologies (including CyTOF and single-cell RNA-seq) to study how mutations in cancer cells signal through all the major cell-types in colorectal cancer (CRC). A major bottleneck of this approach has been the limited computational tools available to analyse such unique data.

This 4-year Cancer Research UK project will fund an exceptional UK/EU bioinformatic PhD student to study cell-cell communication in cancer using single-cell data. The PhD student will start by building computational tools to investigate intracellular signalling. The student will then use cutting-edge proteogenomic methods (integrating single-cell protein and RNA data) to understand how cell-specific ligand and receptor expression connects different cells. The student will then use this data to build detailed intra- and inter-cellular communication networks of tumours. The project will use both statistical and machine learning technologies – spanning both proteomics and genomics. By studying novel computational methods to understand cell-cell communication, this project has the potential to revolutionise our understanding of tumour biology.

The PhD student will be supervised by Dr Chris Tape (Cell Communication Lab, UCL Cancer Institute) and Prof Javier Herrero (Bill Lyons Informatics Centre, UCL Cancer Institute). Earliest start-date: Sept. 2019.

More detailed information about the research project is available on request from [Email Address Removed]