Rudy A Menon PhD Studentship: Autumn/Winter 2025

The following is written by Rita Pereira, the second Rudy A Menon Foundation funded PhD student working at the ICR.

 It was lovely seeing you at the 5th International GC conference. I would like to thank you for all the effort you put into organising it – it was a fantastic three days, full of very interesting presentations and meaningful conservations. Even though I was extremely nervous, it was a great opportunity to be able to present my progress so far and have feedback on how to move forward.

Most of the latest data I generated was presented at the conference. One of my main goals for my PhD is to identify EGFR inhibitor combinations that might be good candidates for the treatment of Gliomatosis Cerebri (GC) and Diffuse Midline Glioma (DMG) with EGFR alterations. I mentioned in my last report that I have screened 18 different EGFR inhibitors across eight of our models. I have now added 2 more cells lines, bringing the total to 10 patient-derived cell lines. I am currently working on combining the 2 EGFR inhibitor candidates selected from this work with our collection of over 800 different drugs in three different cell lines – one screen as been completed and I will hopefully have the results for two others before the end of the year. From there, I will be able to select the most promising combination of drugs for further validation.

I am also working on testing a different way of targeting EGFR via the use of antibodies. I am testing 4 different EGFR antibodies in 4 different patient-derived lines to see how these drugs compare to the small molecule inhibitors I have already tested.

I am also working on developing in utero electroporation (IUE) models of EGFR-altered tumours. These genetic models have the advantage of having a full immune system, allowing the testing of treatment options in a different context compared to the immune compromised animals we use for patient-derived models. As presented at the GC meeting, I have been able to generate tumours in different locations of the brain with different combinations of genetic alterations. I am building up numbers to be able to compare survival and invasion characteristics between the different combinations. I am also working on optimising different techniques to be able to describe these tumours in more depth. In the future, I aim to derive a cell line from the IUE tumours, which can then be used for in vitro and in vivo drug testing and will also be a great resource for the GC research community.

Thank you so much to The Rudy A Menon Foundation for your support and I look forward to sharing more exciting research news.