Profile

Hi! I’m from London – in fact, I’ve actually lived in North, West and East London, so I like to think I know my way around quite well. I’ve graduated as both a chemist and a bioengineer, and my work often involves a mix of chemistry, biology and physics. I’m particularly interested in using science to treat diseases, and I’ve just finished a PhD where I tried to improve the way we treat brain diseases and how we get drugs into the brain. I now work at the University of Oxford in cancer research.

Three random facts about me:

1) I’m a citizen of 3 different countries (on 3 different continents!)

2) I’m allergic to apples…but not apple juice!

3) I’ve held a human brain before!

In my PhD, I tried to improve the way we treat brain diseases. One of the biggest problems is that over 98% of normal drugs can’t enter the brain because of the blood-brain barrier. Unlike the blood vessels in the rest of your body, the cells that make up the walls of the blood vessels in your brain are tightly packed – almost like a brick wall! This stops most drugs from being able to squeeze through the vessels and enter the brain.

One way to get drugs into the brain is to use focused ultrasound (high frequency sound) and small gas bubbles. We inject the bubbles into the blood and apply ultrasound to the region where we want to deliver our drug. Ultrasound makes the bubbles vibrate (think of a speaker!) and push against the blood vessel wall, gently pushing apart the cells and allowing drugs to enter the brain. In my PhD, I tried to make new drugs for Alzheimer’s disease (a brain disease that causes memory loss) and tested them by delivering them into the brains of mice with ultrasound.

Here’s a part of a mouse brain! We applied ultrasound to the left side of the brain to deliver our drug. The drug is the white bit – we can see the drug because it’s fluorescent (it gives off its own light if you shine certain types of light at it).

In my current job, I’m looking at improving targeted radionuclide therapy, a new type of radiotherapy. This involves a radioactive drug – a radiopharmaceutical – which can target cancer cells. The radiopharmaceutical we’re using contains an element called lutetium. Some types of lutetium, such as 177Lutetium, are unstable. 177Lutetium will decay and emit a high-energy electron (this is called beta decay). Radiopharmaceuticals containing 177Lutetium are injected into the body and stick onto cancer cells. They will then slowly fire electrons. If these electrons collide with DNA, they can cause DNA strands to break, leading to the cell dying.

To improve how these drugs work, we’re trying to combine them with other drugs to find combinations that work better than either drug alone; for example, because radiopharmaceuticals work by causing DNA damage, it might work better to combine them with drugs that stop DNA damage from being repaired. We have 2,000 different drugs to try!

To find out if our drugs are working, we add them to cancer cells growing in a plate. Cancer cells multiply very fast; if left alone, they will form colonies (a group of 50+ cells) that we can see with our eyes! If our drugs work and can kill the cancer cells, then we’ll get less colonies surviving (like in the picture on the right).