The Tumour Progression and Heterogeneity Laboratory is seeking a new PhD student
Supervisor: Dr Jean Berthelet
Co-Supervisor: A/Prof Delphine Merino
Laboratory: Tumour Progression and Heterogeneity Laboratory
Breast cancer brain metastasis (BCBM) represents a major challenge in the management of breast cancer patients. This common type of metastasis significantly impacts patient prognosis and quality of life. Understanding the mechanisms underlying BCBM formation and identifying effective therapeutic strategies to prevent or treat these metastases are essential to improving patient outcomes.
This research project focuses on studying BCBM using patient samples and patient-derived xenograft (PDX) models, specifically in triple-negative breast cancer (TNBC) and HER2-positive subtypes. The proposed research aims to address three main objectives:
- Studying intra-patient heterogeneity to identify and characterize the specific clones responsible for BCBM.
- Functionally exploring the role of identified targets to develop innovative therapeutic strategies for BCBM treatment and prevention.
- Investigating inter-patient heterogeneity to discover predictive markers of BCBM formation.
To achieve these objectives, a new optical barcoding strategy called LeGOTeknik will be used. This technique enables the tracking of individual human clones or patient tumours in different organs and facilitates the study of their transcriptomic profiles at the single-cell level.