Cancer Research UK funded Clinical Research Fellowship: Quantifying the Fitness Balance Between Aneuploidy and Driver Mutations in Cancer

We are now accepting applications for our Cancer Research UK funded Clinical Research Fellowships to start in September 2019.

Our Cancer Research UK funded Clinical Research Fellowship provide up to 3 years’ support for clinically qualified professional to undertake research training within Barts Cancer Institute.

This training programme, part of a multimillion pound award from CRUK, aims to develop a cohort of medically qualified scientists equipped both intellectually and technically to conduct the highest quality research on cancer.

The scheme is designed to accommodate the dual clinical-research training career path by allowing fellows to spend a portion of their time on NHS sessions

Fellows will be appointed as a Clinical Research Fellow with the Institute and will be required to register for a PhD, based on research undertaken during the fellowship.

Project Outline:
Aneuploidy (the wrong number of chromosomes) is a ubiquitous feature of cancers, and is associated with therapy resistance, metastasis and poor patient prognosis. Multiple attempts have been made to identify the mutation(s) that allow cancer cells to tolerate aneuploidy but these have had limited success to date. Recently we observed a diploid cell line that spontaneously develops widespread trisomy (an extra copy) of chromosome 12 and concomitant increased proliferation rate after continued passage. This cell line carries a KRAS activating mutation on one allele of chromosome 12 that likely provides a growth advantage when upregulated. This phenomenon challenges the current dogma that aneuploidy provides a barrier per se to efficient proliferation of non-cancer cells, suggesting instead that a single fitness-promoting mutation may be able to ‘tip the balance’ between survival and death in an aneuploid cell.

We will now test the hypothesis that aneuploidy ‘tolerance’ is provided simply by fitness gain associated with DNA copy number changes of pro-growth gene mutations.
The fellow will gain a thorough grounding in the principles of fundamental research, specifically cell culture, aneuploidy detection and manipulation, genome editing, microscopy, coordinating with bioinformaticians and patient sample analyses. The McClelland lab has a wide range of expertise with the relevant techniques and is well placed to provide a supporting and knowledgeable environment, currently comprised of 3 post-docs, 2 PhD students and a bioinformatics research assistant, all working on cancer aneuploidy projects.

For more information, including entry requirements and how to apply, please see:
https://www.bci.qmul.ac.uk/en/study-with-us/postgraduate-research/cruk-clinical-research-fellowships-2019-20