• Question: What disease or cancer are you working on at the moment?

    Asked by impendingdoom to Enda on 24 Apr 2020.
    • Photo: Enda O'Connell

      Enda O'Connell answered on 24 Apr 2020:

      Right now, the University is closed because of the lockdown, so we can’t work on anything new in the lab. We are using that time to do lots of other kinds of important work, like analysing the results from our experiments and writing them up as research papers. We have actually just had three papers accepted for publication. Two of them are looking at using the robot to find marine chemicals that can be used to transform stem cells into other kinds of cells. This is work I did with a scientist from Italy who came to Galway for a few years to work with us. The other paper is looking at using the robot along with a really cool automated microscope to look at the way cells die, so we can understand what is going on when we use different medicines to kill cancer cells and what happens when cells come into contact with toxic chemicals.
      When we (eventually) get back to the lab, there will be lots of new projects for us to work on as everyone has their thinking caps on right now and are applying for funding for new science, including covid-19 research. The next few years will be an exciting time for science

Comments

  • Photo: deshfix123

    deshfix123 commented on :

    I agree.

    And very good question.

  • Photo: Aisling

    Aisling commented on :

    I work on making medicine for brain cancer that affects children, called medulloblastoma (it’s a very big word med-ull-o-blast-o-ma is how you can pronounce it!) Our bodies are very good at keeping healthy. We have lots of cells that make up our blood, our bones, our skin, our organs- everything! Cancer develops when something goes wrong in some of our cells. The bad cancer cells build up and form a tumour. Sometimes the cancer can spread resulting in tumours in different parts of the body. There are lots of medicines to treat cancer, you may have heard of chemotherapy. I am trying to make some new chemotherapy medicines that will stop a tumour from spreading, stop it from growing and make it disappear altogether! The work I do is called medicinal chemistry and I work in a chemistry lab everyday. During quarantine I am staying at home and making lots of plans for what medicines I will try to make when my lab opens again!