Cancer Biology and Therapeutics Lab

Dr. Arman Rahman and Dr. Seodhna Lynch were delighted to be selected for a poster presentation at the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) Annual Meeting 2018 in Chicago, USA. Seodhna’s poster was titled ‘Investigation of miR-205 expression and its methylation status in prostate cancer’.  Seodhna was awarded the UCD Seed Funding Dissemination and Outputs Travel Award 2018 (€2,500) to attend and present at this prestigious, international conference.  Arman’s poster was titled ‘Refining Treatment Recommendations for Lymph Node-Negative Breast Cancer Patients Using a Novel Protein-based Prognostic Signature: The OncoMasTR Assay’.

Congratulations to PhD student Romina Silva for being awarded two travel grants in 2018:

EACR bursary (700€), which was used to attend the EACR conference in Amsterdam (July 2018). She presented her work, entitled “Evaluating Liquid Biopsies for Methylomic Profiling of Prostate Cancer”, in the poster session.

Boehringer Ingelheim Fonds travel grant (1,300€), which was used to attend the EMBL course of Liquid Biopsies in Heidelberg. This was an essential training course for Romina, as liquid biopsies is a key aspect of her PhD project.

21st March: Daffodil Day bake sale – An incredible €823 euro was raised! Congratulations to all involved for a fabulous effort.

Alex successfully applied for an Irish Cancer Society international mobility element, which afforded her the opportunity to spend three months in the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, New York. She was mentored by an expert in the field of Epigenetics, Prof John Greally, in order to learn how to computationally catalogue enhancer activity in prostate cancer.

Lucianne Herda,  Fiona Lanigan (BREAST PREDICT) and Arman  Rahman (OPTi-PREDICT) help launch of Daffodil Day at the Citywest Hotel in Dublin.  Daffodil day takes place very year to help raise money for The Irish Cancer Society.  This year it takes place on March 23rd and the CBT lab and BREAST PREDICT team will have their annual bake sale.

The Conway Institute and Systems Biology Ireland hosted World Cancer Day Flash talks – concise, 3-minute talks, relying on one presentation slide and plenty of enthusiasm!  Congratulations to Charles who won an award for his presentation titled Stratification of Early Stage Breast Cancers Through Prognostic BioMarkers “Shining a Light on the Problem of Overtreatment”.

Dr. Fiona Lanigan and Dr Claire Kilty were both recently honoured for their important contributions to the success of BREAST-PREDICT, the Irish Cancer Society’s Collaborative Cancer Research Centre, when they jointly received the Research Support Staff of the Year award at the 2017 Irish Cancer Society Research Awards, held on November 30 in the House of Lords in Dublin.

Prof. William Gallagher, CBT group leader and Director of the UCD Conway Institute and the Irish Cancer Society’s Collaborative Cancer Research Centre BREAST-PREDICT, was honoured by the Royal Academy of Medicine in Ireland at a ceremony in Kildare Street in November 2017, where he received three awards for his research papers, in the Oncology, Dermatology and Biomedical Sciences categories.

The CBT lab, UCD Conway Institute, Systems Biology Ireland, BREAST-PREDICT and patient advocacy group Europa Donna, together with a number of student societies, came together in October 2017 to raise awareness of the importance of breast health among students on campus for Breast Health Day 2017. Breast Health Day is a global initiative led by Europa Donna which aims to highlight the importance of healthy diet and lifestyle habits in reducing breast cancer risk. Volunteers held hula hooping competitions and handed out fruit provided by our sponsors, Mortons and Donnybrook Fair.

In September 2017, members of the CBT group received awards at the inaugural Research Impact Case Study Awards, run by UCD Research, including two case studies led by the BREAST-PREDICT and OPTi-PREDICT teams within the UCD Conway Institute. These case studies are now available to view on the UCD Research website at http://www.ucd.ie/research/portal/impact/impactcasestudies/