Dr Eileen Parkes has received a Wellcome Trust Clinical Research Career Development Fellowship. This prestigious and highly competitive award will support Eileen and her team with their research into the tumour microenvironment of highly chromosomally unstable oesophageal adenocarcinomas. These aggressive cancers have constitutive cGAS activation, and Eileen, her team and collaborators will model this using novel cell lines and organoids (including fibroblast and immune-cell co-cultures) to understand how this signalling axis impacts the formation of extracellular matrix and subsequent immune infiltration. By unpicking this mechanism, it is hoped that new anti-cancer targets will be identified.
I’m really excited about this work – there is an urgent need to improve how we treat oesophageal cancer, and this work will improve our understanding of the underlying mechanisms driving treatment resistance and disease progression, and hopefully identify new drug targets we can use against this aggressive disease .
- Eileen Parkes
You can read more about the Wellcome Trust and their mission here (opens in the new window).