Dr S Wilson, Prof J Neil
No more applications being accepted
Funded PhD Project (European/UK Students Only)
About the Project
Medical Research Council (MRC) Doctoral Training Programme (DTP) Studentships
Positions are available in the College of Medical Veterinary, Medical and Life Sciences associated with MRC/CSO Social & Public Health Sciences Unit and MRC Centre for Virus Research. Our next intake will be for PhD projects commencing October 2017. The MRC DTP offers PhD with Integrated Study studentships funded by the MRC.
This DTP focuses on training PhD students in key MRC skills priorities in quantitative skills (mathematics, statistics, computation, and developing digital excellence) as applied to variety of data sources (from ‘omics’ to health records), and interdisciplinary skills including imaging and stratified medicine.
ALL PROJECTS CAN BE VIEWED HERE: http://www.gla.ac.uk/colleges/mvls/graduateschool/mrcdtpstudentships2017/projects/ - NOTE: DETAIL WITHIN STEP 6 OF APPLICATION PROCESS THE SUPERVISOR AND PROJECT TITLE.
Supervisors
The successful treatment of advanced cancers using autologous patient T-cells engineered to express chimeric antigen receptors (CAR T-cells) has been heralded as a revolutionary development in cancer immunotherapy. However, serious adverse events include the potentially fatal cytokine release syndrome, while the long term fate of engineered T-cells in vivo is unknown. Most trials to date have employed retroviral or lentiviral vectors to transduce patient T-cells, followed by strong selection for cells with high CAR expression. We have recently found evidence of a post-integration block to retroviral vector expression in normal human peripheral blood cells that is absent from most human leukaemia cell lines. This factor is presumably compromised or down-regulated in high expresser CAR T-cells. The project will make use of our existing toolkits and characterised human cell lines to identify the silencing factor and explore the hypothesis that loss of expression underlies hyper-reactivity and aberrant proliferation of CAR T-cells in vivo.
Funding Notes
Details on 'How to Apply' are available here: http://www.gla.ac.uk/colleges/mvls/graduateschool/mrcdtpstudentships2017/