Kate Duffy has a first-class honours degree in Cellular and Molecular Biology from University College Dublin, she was recently awarded the Irish Cancer Society and Irish Association for Cancer Research Translational PhD Scholarship. Her project is supervised by Dr Antoinette Perry, Associate Professor in Cell and Molecular Biology at the School of Biology and Environmental Science and Dr Margaret Mc Gee, Associate Professor from the School of Biomolecular and Biomedical Science.
Prostate cancer is a common concern for men in Ireland, but with better treatments and awareness, most cases are caught early, leading to better outcomes. However, for some patients, the cancer comes back after treatment, making prostate cancer a leading cause of cancer deaths in Ireland. Kate’s project aims to understand why this happens. She will study tiny parcels called “extracellular vesicles” or “EVs”, that are released by cancer cells to chat with other cells in the body.
Think of this process as having dandelions growing in your garden. Even if you remove the original dandelion, the spores often shed and spread all over the garden. With plants, the spreading process is a bit more straightforward: the spores have seeds in them that allow the plant to keep growing and spreading. But in cancer, the contents of the parcels are not well known. All cells in our body release parcels to communicate with each other. In cancer though, the parcels often carry sinister information that can corrupt healthy cells. The goal of Kate’s project is to study whether parcels (EVs) released by prostate tumours can influence the behaviour of healthy cells, causing them to grow, survive and invade like cancer cells.
Kate’s project has the potential to give us new insights into how some prostate cancers come back when it was thought that all of the tumour was removed. This better understanding of metastasis is essential to improve patient outcomes.
Find her on LinkedIn,
|
