Lucy postdoc Jessica Taylor receives grant from The Little Princess Trust

Jessica is a Postdoctoral Research Associate in the Gilbertson Lab at CRUK Cambridge Institute, School of Clinical Medicine, having recently completed her PhD studies in repurposing chemotherapeutics to treat Glioblastoma Multiforme at the University of Manchester. Her current work in developmental paediatric brain tumours focuses on novel therapeutics that will mitigate post-therapeutic morbidity in brain cancer survivors.

The Little Princess Trust funding Jessica’s work is a Registered Charity that provides free real hair wigs to children and young people, up to 24 years, who have lost their own hair through cancer treatment or other conditions.

Jessica commented: “We are especially excited about this work as we are a translational lab and want to make an impact in the clinic for children with brain tumours. By repositioning existing drugs, we can make the drug discovery process much faster through bypassing some of the more time-consuming and costly aspects of drug discovery. This study focuses on a highly studied and safe drug class - antihistamines. We will demonstrate that anti-histamines can have a synergistic effect with certain existing therapeutics, thereby allowing us to reduce the dose of chemotherapy and/or radiation needed to generate the same therapeutic benefit. This will ultimately lead to less side effects and improving long-term quality of life for children with brain cancer.

 I can’t wait to start this work and present my findings to the Lucy Community!”

Jessica will explaining more about her work and what she hopes to achieve in the grant during her #LivefromLucy talk on the 5th of May. (Event's details will be added soon on our events page.)

You can read more about the Gilbertson group here.