Topics

About this talk

Join us on Wednesday 7 October for the Inaugural Lecture of Professor Sheila Singh. As a new member of our Faculty, Professor Singh will deliver a lecture to showcase her inspiring career journey and research. Doors for this event will be open from 16.45, with the lecture commencing at 17.00. A drinks reception will be held immediately after the lecture at approximately 18.00. Lecture Title: The evolution of brain tumour initiating cells: Chasing a moving target Abstract: Professor Singh was educated in Canada by scientists and clinicians who made seminal breakthrough discoveries in stem cell biology. She applied principles of stem and neurodevelopmental biology to the study of brain cancer, and with her PhD supervisor Dr Peter Dirks, first described a rare population of cancer stem cells that drive brain tumour recurrence, called brain tumour initiating cells (BTICs). BTICs possess unique abilities to evade standard chemo and radiotherapy, and thus escape therapy to drive recurrent, treatment-refractory brain cancer. At the same time, she became a pediatric neurosurgeon and in treating children with resistant brain cancer, she imagined the discovery of more selective and personalised therapies that spare normal neural stem cells in a growing child, but specifically target the self-renewal mechanisms of currently treatment-resistant cancer stem cells. She will describe the translational pipeline built by a large team of scientists to uncover novel targets in treatment-resistant brain cancer, design novel and selective small-molecule and immunotherapies against these targets, and move these discoveries into preclinical and clinical testing for brain cancer patients. Ultimately, the mechanistic understanding of how cancer stem cells evolve through space, time and therapy will inform the development of new and more effective therapeutics, giving new hope to brain cancer patients with currently incurable disease.

→ More information & booking (opens in new tab)