Shauna Crampsie has now completed the first year of her PhD project here at The Institute of Cancer Research (ICR). Under the supervision of Professor Chris Jones, and with the generous support of The Rudy A Menon Foundation, she has made significant progress.
Shauna has just submitted her update report for her transfer viva, which will be assessed in November. This is an important milestone in the progression of the project. The report has brought together all the work completed in the previous year, showing the study of both the tissue samples in Boston and the cell lines analysed in the UK. Excitingly, the report also highlights how GC cells invade and migrate in comparison to non-GC glioma, a key aspect to how this disease presents so differently to other brain tumours.
Shauna’s trip to Boston has been postponed until 2021, when hopefully the pandemic will be under better control. In the meantime, colleagues in Boston have begun to carry out the single cell RNA-sequencing on the collected GC samples in her absence, with Shauna to be involved in the analysis remotely. Also, three additional cases have arrived at the ICR from the Children’s Cancer and Leukaemia Group, which will be sent on to Boston as soon as possible.
In the past few months, Shauna has been continuing her work around Covid-19 restrictions, expanding the cell lines to study what the GC lines are secreting when they are growing and staining the cells when they are in various states, such as invading. This has generated some exciting preliminary data and questions, which she hopes to expand upon in the coming months.
We have recently widened our international links and are now collaborating with international GC platform to help in shaping an online repository, which will enable research on GC to continue and expand globally. Excitingly, we are also hoping to receive up to four new GC cell lines in the next couple of weeks, from Jeff Greenfield in New York and Mara Vinci in Rome. This will expand on our resources in the UK, and allow more exploration of different lines in the months before Christmas.
We hope everyone at The Rudy A Menon Foundation is proud to hear about the progress you have made possible.