Postgraduate Randy Greaves took the top prize for his poster at the annual Cancer Research UK (CRUK) Postgraduate Symposium.
The student-organised symposium included guest speakers, student talks and poster displays about research.
Randy, who is from Jamaica, is in the first year of the Black Leaders in Cancer MRes+PhD Scholarship Programme funded by CRUK.
He is currently based in the Department of Pathology in a cancer immunology lab which looks at how we might increase or enhance the immune system to enable it to fight cancer.
Here he briefly describes his research interests in a Q&A:
What is cancer immunology?
Cancer immunology is the study of the interactions between the immune system and cancer cells. This field looks at how the immune system can recognize and eliminate cancer cells, and how the cancer cells evade immune detection and destruction.
In a healthy individual the immune system patrols the body looking for abnormal cells like cancer cells. When they are detected the are eliminated by the immune system. But for some reason, cancer has developed mechanisms to avoid being detected by the immune system and therefore avoid destruction.
What are T cells?
T cells are part of the adaptive immune system. They help protect the body from infection. T cells important for fighting cancer include CD8+T cells.
How do cancer cells avoid detection?
Cancer cells develop a number of mechanisms to evade immune detection and destruction. These may include loss of tumour antigens (molecules on cancer cells that allow them to be detected by immune cells) or the secretion of immunosuppressive molecules which dampen the immune response.
What did your poster describe?
Tumour interstitial fluid (TiF) - fluid which bathes the tumour - contains all the secretions of the tumour microenvironment. TiF is found to be abundant in many substances such as antioxidant proteins produced by cancer cells.
My poster describes how the antioxidant protein peroxiredoxin 1 (PRDX1) significantly causes a decrease in the proliferation of CD8+T cells while promoting an exhausted phenotype (the physical characteristics of the cell) and affecting T cell activation.
How could this research develop?
Abnormalities within the tumour microenvironment are found to be responsible for the decreased efficacy of many immunotherapeutic agents and this study looks at one component that alters the function of T cells, and provides a basis to study how we can overcome these barriers to immunotherapy.
Read more about Randy and Black Excellence in Cancer on the University website.