We are delighted to announce the following exciting postgraduate opportunities within NBC to start in October 2025 based in our Nucleic Acids Biomarkers Team.
Lead Supervisors: Dr Sara Valpione
Co-Supervisors: Dr Florent Mouliere, Dr Alexandra Clipson, Dr Steven Hill, Dr Seva Makeev, Prof. Wasat Mansoor
Immunotherapy has revolutionised the treatment of cancer bringing significant and durable benefit to patients. However, many patients with cancer do not respond to immunotherapy and can suffer significant side effects. Therefore, the discovery and clinical implementation of biomarkers that could predict and monitor a patient’s response are highly sought after and a critical unmet medical need.
This project will be led by our Clinician-In-Residence Dr Sara Valpione and Dr Florent Mouliere, lead of the Nucleic Acids Biomarkers Team, and will explore the regulation of T cell death and how this could lead to the development of a new blood test to optimise the use of current and next generation immunotherapies.
Applications deadline for this project: 15th November 2024
Please complete your application on The University of Manchester website.
More information can be found here.
Lead Supervisors: Dr Florent Mouliere
Liquid biopsy, and cell-free DNA (cfDNA) in particular, provides the opportunity to noninvasively and frequently analyse the cancer genome. Genomic and epigenomic alterations from the tumour can be retrieved from cfDNA sequencing. However, current liquid biopsy approaches are also biased to cfDNA molecules released by dying cells, only representing a fraction of the cancer clones. Even if the representation of tumour heterogeneity in the blood has been analysed by cfDNA, this vision is limited to the clones subjected to cell-death and does not represent cells that are still alive. It is unclear to what extent nucleic acids are released within extracellular vesicles (EVs), and the additional information exhibited by cellfree RNA (cfRNA) alone or linked to EVs. It is also unclear how well changes in cell phenotypes could be retrieved using cfDNA compared to other circulating markers.
The aim of the project is to establish a better understanding of the extracellular landscape of circulating cfDNA and cfRNA and how they relate to cancer biology/heterogeneity using a complete liquid biopsy profiling. The successful candidate will work at the interface between cancer genomics, liquid biopsy, extracellular vesicles, multiomics, and will benefit from the world-class infrastructure and experience of the CRUK National Biomarker Centre, and in collaboration with clinicians from the Christie hospital to maximise its translational potential.
Applications deadline for this project: 22nd November 2024 at 5pm (UK time)
Please complete your application on the CRUK Manchester Institute website.
More information can be found here.
