Value, Duration and Start Date of the Award

The award covers University fees at the Home/EU rate and a stipend of £14,196 (2015-16) for the four-year duration of your PhD.  International students may apply but must fund the difference between the Home/EU rate and the overseas rate.

Project Start Date: November 2015.

Sponsor

This studentship is funded by Blue Skye Thinking.

Project description

Medulloblastoma accounts for 10% of childhood cancer deaths and there remains an urgent need for innovative therapies which could lead to improved outcomes. Clinical challenges encompass both the need to improve survival rates (currently approximately 70%), and to reduce therapy-related toxicities in surviving patients [1].

Recent advances in our understanding of medulloblastoma biology have identified a number of critical biological pathways in tumour development, and this has led to initiatives to target these pathways therapeutically using novel pathway-specific drugs [2].

This project aims to use contemporary molecular tools and experimental disease models to identify effective drug combinations which could be advanced towards clinical use for medulloblastoma. Gene editing using the CRISPR-CAS9 system provides an exciting new tool, which allows us to systematically assess the functional impact of each gene in the human genome on disease behaviour. We will apply this technology to our novel cell-based models of critical biological changes in medulloblastoma (e.g. MYC), and use these to identify candidate combination therapies and genetic dependencies, which could be exploited to target MYC-dependent medulloblastoma.

Northern Institute for Cancer Research (NICR) is the focus of research excellence in translational cancer research at Newcastle University with over 250 personnel and an annual research income of between £8m and £10m.

References:

1. Pizer BL and Clifford SC. Br J Neurosurg. 2009; 23(4):364-375.

2. Taylor MD, et al Acta Neuropathol. 2012; 123(4):465-472.