Profile

Laboratory manager an oncolytic virotherapy lab at the University of Oxford.

I am also a graduate scholar at Jesus College, Oxford Reading for a DPhil in Oncology.

My interests and expertise lie in virology, oncology, metabolism and microbiology.

I have a background in veterinary sciences and zoonotic microbiology.

I also have a passion for public outreach within science.

Our lab based in Oxford university has created several viruses that have been selected to grow specifically in cancer cells. This “oncolytic virotherapy” is a growing field within cancer research as it opens up several exciting opportunities.

Firstly, because the viruses can only grow and kill cancer cells, injecting live virus into a patient with metastatic cancer (cancer that’s spread around the body) would mean that the virus would potentially find all of the cancer cells all over the body and kill them and when it had killed all the cancer cells it would be cleared from the body (due to natural immunity). This allows for an effective and potent cancer therapy without the many side-effects of current therapies such as radiotherapy and chemotherapy.

Secondly, cancer cells spread and grow so well because they are our own cells that have lost the ability to stop growing. This means that the immune system won’t recognise the cancer as being something bad and will often help the cancer grown by encouraging the growth of new blood vessels within the cancer. A virus that can specifically attack cancer cells will eventually cause that cell to burst open and spill out all its contents (along with thousands of viral particles). This mixture of burst cell remains and virus will trigger the immune system to spot something weird is going on and it will go searching for other cells like this (cancer cells) so you are also training the immune system to spot cancer and help to fight it.

Thirdly, because viruses are just a string of DNA or RNA with a shell around it, you can add other bits of DNA to the virus that you want to be expressed. We can add in DNA sequences that cause production of anti-cancer drugs which (because our virus only replicates in cancer cells) will only be produced in these cells allowing us to stop the side-effects of current anti-cancer therapies like chemotherapy causing hair loss.
Also, we can add in a gene from a fluorescent jellyfish that will only be produced in cancer cells and will light them all up allowing doctors to easily remove cancers (especially when they are metastatic.

I grow different cancer cells in the lab and use patient clinical samples to test how well our virus kills cancer and to see what cells it cannot kill and why.