Meet the Precision Oncology Ireland researchers funded by the Irish Cancer Society
The Irish Cancer Society is proud to be a charity partner in Precision Oncology Ireland (POI). As part of POI, the Irish Cancer Society is providing funding of €500,000 to develop a multiplexed tissue imaging platform for biomarker validation.
Precision Oncology Ireland is a consortium of five Irish Universities, six Irish Charities, and eight companies aiming to develop new diagnostics and therapeutics for the personalised treatment of cancer. The Consortium is part-funded by Science Foundation Ireland under their Strategic Partnership Programme.
Personalised medicine in cancer means treatment that is tailored to each individual. A ‘one type fits all’ approach to cancer treatment is not always ideal because we are all biologically different which means we can all respond differently to the same treatment, even if we have the same cancer type. This is where personal treatment is required but we first need to have a way of telling who will respond to what treatment. One way of doing this is to look at biomarkers.
A biomarker is an indicator of what is going on in our bodies. An example of a biomarker would be a particular protein being seen in tissue when cancer is present. By studying different biomarkers, we can find out more about what is going on in our bodies and then use this information to predict who would respond to different cancer treatments. The more biomarkers we study the more information we have to help predict individual responses to treatments.
As part of POI the Irish Cancer Society is funding a project that is developing ways to see lots of different biomarkers in tissues at the same time using a technique called multiplexing. Using these pieces of information, the aim is to predict personalised treatment across a variety of cancer tissue types.
This project supports two experienced researchers and a PhD student. This part of the POI program is being led by Professor William Gallagher in University College Dublin.
The POI Tissue Imaging Platform is coordinated by Dr Arman Rahman (Translational Research and Engagement Manager, POI). Dr Rahman (MD, PhD) is a medical doctor now working full-time as a cancer researcher. He has more than twelve years of post-doctoral research experience working in Umea University Sweden, Cambridge University, UK, and Dublin City University, Ireland. Dr. Rahman has extensive experience in developing tissue-based assays in both academic and commercial research environments.
Dr Claudia Aura (MD) is a Research Pathologist working within the POI imaging platform. She originally graduated from Argentina and obtained the Official Recognition of Anatomy Pathology Specialist in 2006 from the Ministry of Education and Science, Madrid, Spain. Dr Aura gained eight years of research experience working as a Molecular Pathologist in Barcelona, Spain. She has also worked in several EU-funded research programs in Cambridge, the UK, and KU Leuven, Belgium. Dr Aura has extensive experience in digital pathology; she has particular expertise in the field of artificial intelligence in histological image analysis.
In May 2020, Chowdhuri Arif Jahangir started his PhD program under the joint supervision of Professor William Gallagher and Dr Arman Rahman within the POI program. His project aims at exploring the interaction between cancer cells and immune cells within breast and other cancer types using multiplexed IHC and digital pathology. After obtaining a BSc in Biotechnology (1st Class Honours) from the University of Rajshahi (Bangladesh), Arif completed a Master’s degree from Karolinska Institute, Sweden. Arif worked as a research assistant in the Cancer Biology and Therapeutics Lab at University College Dublin led by Prof Gallagher before joining the POI program. He gathered significant experience in various tissue-based detection techniques working under the SFI-funded OPTi-PREDCI project before undertaking his PhD program.
To learn more about the Precision Oncology Ireland program, please visit the POI website.
