CRUK funded PhD studentship: Characterisation of novel PD-L1-like Immuno-Regulators and their Role in Lung Cancer Biology

Our CRUK funded PhD studentship provides up to 3 years’ support to undertake research training within Barts Cancer Institute.

Barts Cancer Institute has an international reputation for cancer research, with world renowned experts in the field.

Our training programme aims to develop a cohort of scientists equipped both intellectually and technically to conduct the highest quality research on cancer.

Our research degrees are supplemented by a comprehensive support programme, providing training in a wide range of biomedical laboratory methods and other vital transferable skills.

To be eligible you should have, or be expecting, a 2:1 or 1:1 in a relevant degree. Students for whom English is not a first language will also be required to meet our English language requirements.

Project Outline:
Lung cancer is the most common malignancy and the leading cause of cancer death globally. Although considerable advances in diagnosis and treatment of lung cancer have been made, the five-year survival rate of lung cancer is still poor. Therefore, it is imperative to further investigate the underlying mechanism of lung tumourigenesis and identify new targets for diagnosis and novel treatments. We have recently found that a deregulation of miRNA-silencing and hypoxia in cancer can affect tumour immunity. This PhD project will characterise new PD-L1-like immunoregulators and potential checkpoint inhibitors as novel biomarkers and targets for the development of immunotherapeutics in a panel of in vitro and in vivo lung cancer models.

Specially, this project will explore next-generation sequencing (RNA-Seq) data from human primary cells where there is defective hypoxic and miRNA signalling, recapitulating two key deregulated processes in many cancers. We will examine which mRNA and proteins are differentially expressed and also, from our preliminary analysis, which of these candidates have similar expression profiles and gene regulatory characteristics similar to those of PD-L1 and CTL4A.

This project is very novel and promises to produce significant amounts of new data and biology with respect to the exciting field of immune-oncology. Furthermore, this project will build the student’s skills in analysing NGS data and RNASeq, molecular cell biology and in vivo models of tumourigenesis, giving the student a fully rounded training in molecular oncology.


For more information, including details on how to apply please see our website:
http://www.bci.qmul.ac.uk/study-with-us/postgraduate-research/cruk-phd-studentship-2017-18