Profile

I work with a type of breast cancer that is difficult to cure because the cancer cells learn to adapt so they can avoid being killed by drugs – this is called resistance and is a serious problem for patients. It means that these cancers are far more likely to come back after they have been treated and that people with this breast cancer are less likely to be cured. I am looking at this type of cancer to find differences between it and other cancers which do not get resistant to drugs. That way, we can work out how it becomes resistant and how to stop it. I am also testing different mixtures of drugs in cancer cells to see if I can find a mixture of drugs that works even in resistant cancers.

I come in to the office as early as I can manage and the first thing I do is look at my cancer cells under the microscope to make sure they are alive and healthy – I call them my babies because they need so much attention! Then my days in the lab are quite varied – sometimes I’ll be in meetings to discuss my results, sometimes I’ll be in the hospital finding tumours that patients have donated for research to bring back to the lab, and sometimes I’ll be reading about research other scientists do. But most of the time I’ll be doing experiments on cancer cells and tumours and writing and drawing graphs of my own results, which is a really exciting thing to do as you can be the only person in the whole world to know something! Then the evenings are for fun – and lots of it!