What is your PhD about?
I’m looking for new treatment strategies for lung cancer. The issue with lung cancer, and really all cancers, is that what drives the disease in one patient may not be the same in the next patient and this can result in different responses to therapy. For example, some people will respond better to chemotherapy than others.
How is your project tackling this issue?
My project at UCD School of Biomolecular and Biomedical Science looks at a subset of lung cancer that typically doesn’t respond well to current treatments.
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We want to find factors that are driving the cancer to grow in these subtypes so that we can create a treatment to go in and stop these drivers’ activities and hopefully stop the disease in its tracks. In my project, the “drivers” we are looking at are called long non-coding RNAs.
What are long non-coding RNAs?
Each cell in our body is a tiny, complex system made up of many components that have specific roles. Long non-coding RNAs can control this system by interacting directly with these cell components and guiding their activity.
Unfortunately, sometimes these controllers go awry and can guide the cell components incorrectly, which leads to the cell becoming unhealthy, and potentially cancerous. It is only in the last two decades that scientists have uncovered the true importance of long non-coding RNAs, so it is a very new and exciting field of research.
You recently won a speaking competition with a metaphor – tell us more.
I was lucky enough to take part in the UCD Engage competition, where PhD researchers come up with metaphorical way of explaining their projects in an engaging and accessible manner. My project funders, Breakthrough Cancer Research, introduced me to patient advocates Marian O’Mahony, Mary Neville and Siobhán Hughes, and together we curated the metaphor of an orchestra.
How does it apply to your project?
In essence, a healthy cell is like a perfect symphony orchestra producing beautiful music. Imagine there are too many conductors, they are all shouting over each other and causing havoc, ultimately losing control, and what was once a harmony is now a screeching tragedy.
It’s the same in the cell, if there are too many long non-coding RNAs, they can start to act a bit crazy and lose control of the cell components, and what was once a healthy cell can be driven to become an unhealthy, out-of-control, cancerous cell.
So the question is, if we can fire the excess conductors in the orchestra, or get rid of the extra long non-coding RNAs in the cell, can we bring back our perfect symphony or our healthy cell?
What do you hope the impact of your research will be?
If we find the long non-coding RNAs that are responsible for driving the cancer progression in our subset of lung cancer, we can create a treatment to target it. This means personalised treatments for many patients that currently don’t have many options.
However, the process of drug discovery, testing and approval is extremely lengthy, meaning it will likely be some years before such a drug will be available clinically. My project is in essence a cog in the wheel of getting these treatments to patients, but each cog is important.
What do you like to do outside of research?
Sometimes the lab work can be quite stressful, so you need to have things outside the lab that you enjoy. For me, that’s often spending time with family, heading to a pilates class or even doing a crossword – my grandad’s love for The Irish Times crossword has been successfully passed down!
