Building skills and capacity for impact in cancer research
From computer modelling to communication to connecting with collaborators, the next generation of researchers have been building a swathe of skills through Precision Oncology Ireland.
Taking the stress out of moving research back to Ireland
When biomedical researcher Dr Claire Robinson from Wicklow got her PhD from UCD, she went abroad and worked in Toronto, Canada. But after eight years there, she felt a strong urge to move back home. “I really wanted to move back to Ireland with a view to eventually setting up my own group, so I started talking to the cancer researchers I knew at home, and they told me Precision Oncology Ireland was starting up and it could be a good way to step back into the Irish cancer research ecosystem. So Claire applied for and got a prestigious Marie Curie Development Fellowship to make the move, and started as a post-doc in Precision Oncology Ireland, working with Prof Afshin Samali and Prof Adrienne Gorman at the University of Galway.
“We looked at the stress pathways that are active in cancer cells, particularly breast cancer and pancreatic cancer, with a view to developing strategies to intervene in those pathways,” explains Claire, who spent time working with POI industry partner Cell Stress Discoveries. “That time working with the company was really valuable, as it gave me new insights into how research is used in drug development.”
And, as she had anticipated, Precision Oncology Ireland provided an excellent network to get to know who was working on what in cancer in Ireland. With that solid footing, and with a grant from Precision Oncology Ireland partner Breakthrough Cancer Research, Claire has now set up her own research group of five in University College Dublin, and she is a Conway Fellow at UCD School of Medicine.
“We are looking at cell stress pathways in pancreatic and kidney cancer,” she explains. “The opportunities that Precision Oncology Ireland gave me to really understand cancer research in Ireland have been enormously important for me to be able to set up my own research group.”
The art of communicating and collaborating
Dr Elan McCarthy holds a special place in the history of Precision Oncology Ireland, as she was the first PhD student to graduate from the consortium. During her PhD with Prof Roisin Dwyer at the University of Galway, Elan looked at how a small molecule called microRNA-379 affects advanced breast cancer tumours. She showed that mir-379 can shrink tumours in the lab, and she explored how small, naturally occurring delivery bubbles called extracellular vesicles might offer a route of delivering them to tumours in the body. Part of that work involved getting stuck into producing the extracellular vesicles, optimising a protocol for growing the stem cells that produce them in large bioreactors.
“Precision Oncology Ireland really helped me to collaborate with people on lots of different aspects of the research,” says Elan, who is now working as a post-doc at the University of Galway and Queen’s University Belfast as part of the All-Island Cancer Research Institute. “AICRI involves more collaboration between cancer researchers, and I’m using many of the skills I developed in Precision Oncology Ireland for this work, where we are seeing how clusters of microRNAs might work together to inhibit cancer cells.”
Elan honed some of those skills at a Precision Oncology Ireland Training Retreat in Portumna in 2022, where she and fellow early-career researchers learned about innovation, commercialisation, leadership and mentorship and the competed in a Dragons' Den-style competition. Elan’s team won.
“We were given scenarios and we had to pitch potential new therapies to an external panel of experts,” she recalls. “It was fun, and we also got to learn more about perspectives of people outside academia.”
Elan also took part in Precision Oncology Ireland workshops about storytelling, statistics and project management, and her communications skills came to the fore when she gave a presentation about her research at Precision Oncology Ireland’s interim external review.
“I was in the second year of my PhD and presenting and answering their questions really focused my mind,” she says. “I felt that really helped me later on when I was defending my thesis at my viva, and I’ve developed a strong interest in communication more generally.”
AI’s next top model for predicting responses to cancer drugs
What springs to mind when you think of cancer research? Maybe it’s scientists growing cells in a lab, or clinical trials where patients receive new medicines. But like many aspects of modern life, AI is revolutionising cancer research. And for Dr Luis Iglesias Martinez, Precision Oncology Ireland has enabled him to develop and share his skill of building computer models with AI to predict how cancer cells will respond to drugs. Luis started his studies in chemical engineering, and during his PhD started to work on developing code to make models of how cells function. When he came to work in Precision Oncology Ireland as a post-doc, he deepened his skills in AI to develop simulations that predict how patients are likely to respond to cancer treatments.
“Making models of cancer cells is hard, because they can have multiple genetic changes that have different effects,” explains Luis. “Working out such complex predictions by hand would be impossible.”
Luis has also shared his own knowledge and good practices with the Precision Oncology Ireland community, running a workshop on statistics and design, encouraging sessions where researchers review each other’s computer codes and provide feedback and creating a repository of code that researchers can easily access and share.
Now Luis has gone on to set up his own research group at Systems Biology Ireland in UCD to continue the work, and he currently has five researchers working with him.
“Biology has changed a lot, and with the kinds of dry modelling skills that I further developed working within Precision Oncology Ireland, we can harness AI to find lots more answers from cancer cells.”
Figuring out food, obesity, cancer and now the immune tumour microenvironment
What kinds of foods fuel obesity-driven cancer? During her PhD within Precision Oncology Ireland, Dr Kathleen Mitchelson looked at how obesity-driven cancers respond to different types of fat. Working with Professor Helen Roche at University College Dublin and Professor Jacintha O’Sullivan at Trinity College Dublin, Kathleen was able to combine insights about nutrition and cancer cell biology. Her experiments discovered that saturated fats drove changes in oesophageal and colorectal cancer cell metabolism that were in line with oncogenic behaviour while monounsaturated fats had less of a fuelling effect on them.
“As a researcher I really benefited from the extensive Precision Oncology Ireland network. Helen’s expertise in human nutrition and nutrigenomics was complemented with Jacintha’s expertise in translational oncology which provided a collaborative environment learning from experts with very different backgrounds. Furthermore, through POI resources and infrastructure, I was given the ability to learn from experts in proteomics and signalling networks specifically from Assistant Professor David Gomez- Matallanas in Systems Biology Ireland. Overall, I had access to facilities and experts across two universities as well as the wider POI network, which helped me to push the science further,” says Kathleen, who also enjoyed getting the message out to wider communities, including patients, ethnic minorities and the public at large.
“It was really helpful to get to speak with people outside the lab about the research,” she says. “Sometimes as a scientist you can get absorbed in the day to day of lab work, and it's possible to lose sight of the impact your research can have on people. So explaining the research to patients and the public helped me to appreciate their perspectives and allowed me to use that in future research to strengthen the relevance of how my work could impact people’s food choices around cancer and make a difference.”
Kathleen also took part in many training opportunities through POI, including how to improve her scientific writing and communications, and thanks to a grant from POI partner the Irish Cancer Society, she travelled to Colorado to present her work at a large Keystone Conference, which opened yet another door for her career, when she met immunologist Professor Jeff Rathmell from Vanderbilt University in Nashville.
“He was interested in my expertise in nutrition, obesity, and cancer, and I am now starting a post-doctoral research fellow post in his immunometabolism lab,” says Kathleen. “And I know that being a part of such a broad set of communities in the POI network and getting so much support as a PhD researcher has given me unique skills and insights that I will carry into my new role and throughout my future career.”