Black excellence in cancer research at Cambridge

Black scientists in Cambridge are driving change to help create a cancer research sector that better represents the wider population.

Read the full article, including the profile of our very own Magda Ali!

Magda Ali is in her final year of the Cancer Research UK Cambridge Centre MRes + PhD in Cancer Biology funded studentship at the Department of Pathology and Lucy Cavendish College.

After graduating from King’s College London with a degree in Biomedical Science, she spent two years working as a scientist on cell and gene therapy assets at GlaxoSmithKline, before beginning her PhD researching immune cell trafficking into solid tumours.

“I loved my undergraduate degree, every part of it, I found it fascinating!” she said. “In my final year I studied the biology of cancer and it felt like that was what everything had been leading up to. It put all of the things I’d studied up to that point into the context of this horrible disease, that dysregulates everything and co-opts all of these pathways that normally work well, using them to its own advantage. I found the complexity of the disease really interesting, particularly because of cancers resistance mechanisms. It’s the biggest challenge.”

During her degree, Magda specialised in cancer immunology. “I was really lucky to get a final year degree project in a lab working on immunotherapies – it was becoming a hot field at that time so it was a great opportunity.”

And off the back of the lab experience she built up during her degree, Magda landed a position at GSK, where she worked for two years before applying for her PhD.

She said: “Not many people from my school went on to University to study for an undergraduate degree, let alone to study for a PhD, but it was something I’d known I wanted to do for a long time.

“It’s important that there is representation of all races and heritages when it comes to research and running clinical trials, and not just at the point of developing the drug – but at the point of thinking about which questions to ask. We need diverse minds and diverse backgrounds to ask questions that are relevant for everybody, to make sure there’s equal access to healthcare. Education is such a privilege, and although some people make a huge effort, I think in general we can do much better at communicating science to the public.

“After my PhD, I hope to work as a science communicator to bridge the gap between science and the public.”

Lab photo

The Golden Pipette

Science plays the long game, but Adrian Liston celebrates the small achievements his team makes along the way. 

Danielle Gerhard, PhD, writing for The Scientist

Hanging on the wall of immunologist Adrian Liston's laboratory at the University of Cambridge is a commemorative plaque. Engraved are the names of laboratory members who received the Golden Pipette Award, an annual honor that recognizes incremental advancements and team players. It may or may not grant the recipient the Midas Touch, but Liston reflected on how the tradition fosters a sense of community.

What is the Golden Pipette origin story?

In 2016, we had a special PhD candidate graduating from the lab. James Dooley had been a technician in my lab for several years prior to his graduation. To celebrate his achievements and the impact he had on the careers of others in the team, we painted one of his pipettes gold. The gesture was well received, so each year, we award the pipette to an individual who made a significant contribution to the team.

What does the Golden Pipette represent?

Science is tough. We work at the very limits of human knowledge, which means we constantly fail. The Golden Pipette tradition is one of the ways we create a positive culture and supportive environment. Big achievements, such as a paper, take a long time, so it’s important to celebrate the small successes: generating a transgenic mouse; developing a new protocol; the heroic effort that ends up as supplementary figure 12. It also signals our values and priorities: imagination, creativity, robust science, and team contributions. 

How did your team respond to the Golden Pipette?

It seemed silly at first, but the tradition has outlasted everyone in the group. It serves as a visual reminder that we’re part of a greater project. In a recent hiring round, several people said that they look forward to the chance of winning the Golden Pipette.

Read the story as told in The Scientist...

Becoming a Scientist: The Graphic Novel

Our latest project has just been released: Becoming a Scientist: The Graphic Novel!

The novel follows the stories of the amazing team members in the lab (or, at least, those team members who have been around since last October when we started this project!). We follow their story in becoming a scientist: the barriers they had to overcome, the role-models who helped them on the way, and the motivation that drove them to enter STEM.

This is a unique project for us, because it isn't about our science. It is about us as scientists. Where we came from, and how we got here. None of us were destined for science, yet somehow here we are, working together to better the world...

Our amazing illustrator, Yulia Lapko, brings to life each person's story. We have Magda, daughter of Somali refugees, drawing strength from her mother's sacrifice and equally determined to help others in turn. We have Alvaro, who barely managed to get into school growing up in Peru, and has now made it to Cambridge with a ripper of an under-graduate project. James, who took a long and winding route, overcoming every disadvantage life gives a foster kid, and yet somehow beating the odds and now helping others succeed. Stevi made the transition from patient to researcher, and Tombi brings her mission from Zimbabwe to help the global ubuntu. I realised, looking around the lab, that I could talk about how inspiring I find literally every person - so I put them all into a book!

I draw inspiration from these amazing team members. I could have written this story at any point over the past fifteen years - we have nearly 200 amazing alumni, each with their own unique story. I wrote these stories to provide role-models to anyone thinking about starting a career in science. Science is not for the privileged few. Science is for anyone who has ever asked "why?", and anyone who is too stubborn to know when to stop asking! Take a look into these stories - if we can succeed in science, you can too!

The book is live now to read at Issuu, and will be released soon in print. If you want to support more innovative projects in broadening participation from our lab, drop us a donation!

In the news

The Cambridge Independent

Improving research culture within your lab

The companion piece to our article on nurturing a positive research culture at the organisation level, our new article should hit closer to home for most researchers - how to nurture a positive research culture at your individual lab level!

Running a research team is not simply about producing important research findings. It is important for the team leader to also focus on creating an environment that is a positive experience for the team members and a place for them to build further careers from. Focus on the culture of the team feeds back into the quality of the research, aiding impactful, reproducible and ethical research. Part of building a positive research environment comes from your role as a leader, and interacting with you team with kindness and integrity. However you can aid this process by engineering the structure of your team and through thoughtful consideration of your language and actions. In this article we discuss several tactics to research team leadership that may help team leaders create a positive environment for their team members.

Read at Wellcome Open Research

Liston-Dooley lab on The Naked Scientists

I was interviewed about our latest Immunity paper on tissue-resident Tregs by Chris Smith from The Naked Scientists. If you are interested, the segment airs in the UK on BBC 5 Live Sunday morning 6am and in Australia on ABC Radio National Friday night at 10pm. Otherwise, download the podcast and hear what we are up to!

New finding about regulatory T cells could help treat diseases such as multiple sclerosis

In EuroNews

Researchers at the University of Cambridge say their discovery of “new rules of the immune system” could improve the treatment of inflammatory diseases such as multiple sclerosis (MS).

Scientists have discovered that regulatory T cells, a type of white blood cell, constantly move throughout the body looking for and repairing damaged tissue.

It was believed that regulatory T cells exist as multiple populations restricted to specific parts of the body.

Now, researchers have found that they roam around the body as a single large population of cells and target areas of inflammation, which destroys nerves and leads to a loss of movement.

Congratulations to Alvaro Hernandez!

Congratulations to Alvaro Hernandez for winning the 12th Golden Pipette for his work on fate-mapping microglia clonality during health and disease! The first time that the Golden Pipette has been won by an under-graduate research - an amazing accomplishment!

Discovery of ‘new rules of the immune system’ could improve treatment of inflammatory diseases, say scientists.

Scientists at the University of Cambridge have discovered that a type of white blood cell - called a regulatory T cell - exists as a single large population of cells that constantly move throughout the body looking for, and repairing, damaged tissue.

This overturns the traditional thinking that regulatory T cells exist as multiple specialist populations that are restricted to specific parts of the body. The finding has implications for the treatment of many different diseases – because almost all diseases and injuries trigger the body’s immune system.

Current anti-inflammatory drugs treat the whole body, rather than just the part needing treatment. The researchers say their findings mean it could be possible to shut down the body’s immune response and repair damage in any specific part of the body, without affecting the rest of it. This means that higher, more targeted doses of drugs could be used to treat disease – potentially with rapid results.

It's difficult to think of a disease, injury or infection that doesn’t involve some kind of immune response, and our finding really changes the way we could control this response.

Adrian Liston

“We’ve uncovered new rules of the immune system. This ‘unified healer army’ can do everything - repair injured muscle, make your fat cells respond better to insulin, regrow hair follicles.  To think that we could use it in such an enormous range of diseases is fantastic: it’s got the potential to be used for almost everything,” said Professor Adrian Liston in the University of Cambridge’s Department of Pathology, senior author of the paper.

To reach this discovery, the researchers analysed the regulatory T cells present in 48 different tissues in the bodies of mice. This revealed that the cells are not specialised or static, but move through the body to where they’re needed. The results are published today in the journal Immunity.

“It's difficult to think of a disease, injury or infection that doesn’t involve some kind of immune response, and our finding really changes the way we could control this response,” said Liston.

He added: “Now that we know these regulatory T cells are present everywhere in the body, in principle we can start to make immune suppression and tissue regeneration treatments that are targeted against a single organ – a vast improvement on current treatments that are like hitting the body with a sledgehammer.”

Using a drug they have already designed, the researchers have shown - in mice - that it’s possible to attract regulatory T cells to a specific part of the body, increase their number, and activate them to turn off the immune response and promote healing in just one organ or tissue.

“By boosting the number of regulatory T cells in targeted areas of the body, we can help the body do a better job of repairing itself, or managing immune responses,” said Liston.

He added: “There are so many different diseases where we’d like to shut down an immune response and start a repair response, for example autoimmune diseases like multiple sclerosis, and even many infectious diseases.”

Most symptoms of infections such as COVID are not from the virus itself, but from the body’s immune system attacking the virus. Once the virus is past its peak, regulatory T cells should switch off the body’s immune response, but in some people the process isn’t very efficient and can result in ongoing problems. The new finding means it could be possible to use a drug to shut down the immune response in the patient’s lungs, while letting the immune system in the rest of the body continue to function normally.

In another example, people who receive organ transplants must take immuno-suppressant drugs for the rest of their lives to prevent organ rejection, because the body mounts a severe immune response against the transplanted organ. But this makes them highly vulnerable to infections. The new finding helps the design of new drugs to shut down the body’s immune response against only the transplanted organ but keep the rest of the body working normally, enabling the patient to lead a normal life.

Most white blood cells attack infections in the body by triggering an immune response. In contrast, regulatory T cells act like a ‘unified healer army’ whose purpose is to shut down this immune response once it has done its job - and repair the tissue damage caused by it.

The researchers are now fundraising to set up a spin-out company, with the aim of running clinical trials to test their findings in humans within the next few years.

The research was funded by the European Research Council (ERC), Wellcome, and the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC).

Reference: Liston, A. ‘The tissue-resident regulatory T cell pool is shaped by transient multi-tissue migration and a conserved residency program.’ Immunity, June 2024. DOI: 10.1016/j.immuni.2024.05.023

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In brief

• A single large population of healer cells, called regulatory T cells, is whizzing around our body - not multiple specialist populations restricted to specific parts of the body as previously thought.
• These cells shut down inflammation and repair the collateral damage to cells caused after our immune system has responded to injury or illness.
• Tests, in mice, of a drug developed by the researchers showed that regulatory T cells can be attracted to specific body parts, boosted in number, and activated to suppress immune response and rebuild tissue.
• Current anti-inflammatory drugs used for this purpose suppress the body’s whole immune system, making patients more vulnerable to infection.
• The discovery could lead to more targeted treatments, with fewer side-effects, for issues from lengthy COVID infections to autoimmune diseases like multiple sclerosis. Clinical trials in humans are now planned.