The Cardiff CLL group is featured in the latest issue of the Cardiff University School of Medicine newsletter (Remedy, page 4). Click on the image and you will see a good general summary of the group’s research and a nice picture of the happy (ish) workers.
Professor Chris Fegan featured in the media, after the announcement of promising results from a clinical trial of obinutuzumab (GA101) conducted in Cardiff.
Click on the picture to watch the video interview with Chris (this can also be found at http://www.itv.com/news/wales/topic/cardiff/)
More details on the story can be found below:
http://www.express.co.uk/news/uk/400000/Drug-hope-for-leukaemia-sufferers
Last Friday after 3 years of hard work, Ryan Wong successfully defended his PhD thesis entitled “Breaking T cell Tolerance in Chronic Lymphocytic Leukaemia”. HIs project funded by Cancer Research Wales, and supervised by Steve Man and Chris Pepper (both declined to be pictured for this article) has been very successful, and has already produced one publication with another manuscript currently under review. According to the examiners, Ryan had produced a lot of interesting results and was well prepared for his viva.
So well done, and congratulations from everyone in the Cardiff CLL group.
ps This is going to a busy year for the PhD students in the group, three more are expected to submit their PhD theses this year. So that’s one down and three to go.
The New Year could be an interesting year for the CLL group for all sorts of reasons, but the main focus remains on conducting high quality research. The last year ended with the great news that two more papers from the group had been accepted for publication. Both papers involved the study of prognostic markers in untreated CLL patients, and suggest immune or tumour cell markers that correlate with disease progression.
Papers:
Expansion of a CD8+PD-1+ replicative senescence phenotype in early stage CLL patients is associated with inverted CD4:CD8 ratios and disease progression. Nunes CT, Wong R, Mason M, Fegan C, Man S, Pepper C. Clin Cancer Res. 2011 Dec 21. [Epub ahead of print]
Defining the prognosis of early stage chronic lymphocytic leukaemia patients. Pepper C, Majid A, Lin TT, Hewamana S, Pratt G, Walewska R, Gesk S, Siebert R, Wagner S, Kennedy B, Miall F, Davis ZA, Tracy I, Gardiner AC, Brennan P, Hills RK, Dyer MJ, Oscier D, Fegan C. Br J Haematol. 2011 Dec 15. doi: 10.1111/j.1365-2141.2011.08974.x. [Epub ahead of print]
More publicity following the announcement of the LLR grant to Duncan and Chris. The research on telomeres in CLL was cited as an example of “Innovation in the NHS” during a talk by Andrew Lewis (Director of Innovation and Improvement, Cardiff & Vale NHS Trust). This talk was part of the inaugural conference for the new institute of Translation, Innovation, Methods and Engagement (TIME) held in Cardiff on the 17th November. There was also an excellent talk by Huw Evans (4th year medical student) who summarised the results of his SSC project on immunological prognostic markers in CLL. Hopefully, he will give a more detailed account of his project work on this blog soon.
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