The following is an update from The ICR on The Rudy A Menon PhD Studentship:
It has been a very exciting time for the lab and Shauna over the past few months. Now that travel restrictions have eased, Shauna was able to finally visit Boston in person and work with Mariella Filbin’s team at the DanaFaber Cancer Institute. This trip has been delayed significantly by Covid, despite the team’s best efforts to keep going through the pandemic, so it was a great experience for Shauna to finally arrive in the US and carry out research there.
Shauna was in Boston from mid-November to mid-February and got to enjoy three months with the team, plus experience Boston’s impressive museums and history. Luckily, it was a rather mild Boston winter, although there was a near-record breaking snowfall during one weekend!
During her time with Mariella’s fantastic team, Shauna managed to complete a lot of work with the help of Ilon Liu, a post-doc in Mariella’s lab. In fact, Ilon and Shauna nearly completed the entire cohort of collected tumours for GC during her time there! There is just a small amount of lab work to do now in order to complete this dataset for single cell analysis.
Between the labs involved in this project, the team managed to collect 26 unique GC cases to use for this study. During Shauna’s time in Boston, they were able to effectively finish the lab work on these unique samples, and Shauna gained critical experience – and appreciation - of the process for single cell sequencing that Mariella’s team are experts in. The most fulfilling aspect for Shauna was being able to contribute to the dataset that has been in the pipeline since the beginning of the studentship. The exciting part is beginning to analyse the data that these samples will have yielded!
It was amazing for Shauna to finally meet Mariella’s team, all of whom made her feel exceptionally welcomed into the lab and were extremely helpful in getting her established in a short period of time. The opportunity for labs to collaborate and share knowledge in such a physical way has been tricky due to the pandemic, and chances to meet with colleagues at conferences were unable to happen either. For Shauna to be able to join Mariella’s team as originally planned and reacquaint with those she had initially met in 2019 at the Third International Congress on Gliomatosis Cerebri in Barcelona was a fantastic boost that could not have happened without the support of The Rudy A Menon Foundation.
By enabling Shauna with the opportunity to be based in different labs, The Rudy A Menon foundation has provided the collaborating researchers with ample chance to strengthen their connections with each other. Not only is this wonderful for Shauna to experience as a student, it also is important and vital as the project moves towards analysis of the dataset. The collaborative nature of this project has meant that each lab within it has been able to strengthen their work towards understanding GC and allowed everyone to approach the disease from multiple angles. Shauna is looking forward to completing more work with Mara Vinci in the next few weeks when she will be joining her at Bambino Gesu Hospital, Rome.
Thank you to everyone at The Rudy A Menon Foundation for making this progress possible. Your generosity and tireless support truly means a great deal to Shauna, Professor Chris Jones, and everyone collaborating on this exciting project in Rudy’s name and honour.
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