Congratulations to PhD student Billy Brennan who won a Poster Prize at the Irish Melanoma Forum in University College Dublin last week.
Billy’s work, which is funded by Research Ireland and Breakthrough Cancer Research, looks at developing new drug options for uveal melanoma (UM).
UM is considered a rare cancer. However, it is the most common cancer of the eye in adults, and Ireland has one of the highest rates of this cancer in the world. Furthermore, while the cancer in the eye can often be successfully treated, in up to 50 % of patients the cancer will spread, most often to the liver. For these patients, there are limited treatment options and generally poor outcomes. Hence, it is important to develop new treatments for this disease.
The project involves carefully designing and refining new drug compounds that target a protein, called cysteinyl leukotriene receptor 1 (CysLTR1), which is linked to UM. These drugs are also designed to block the growth of new blood vessels, something cancers rely on to grow and spread.
Previous research, completed by Dr Alina Qaisar, identified new drugs which can target CysLTR1 and evaluated their safety and ability to prevent new blood vessels forming in zebrafish.
Building on this, Billy’s project investigated if these drugs inhibit the proliferation of UM cells, using two experiments with UM cells in the lab. One of these experiments used an Incucyte system, which imaged UM cells every six hours for four days. After four days, he did another experiment called the MTT assay, which measured the metabolic activity of the cells. These experiments showed that the drugs can reduce UM cell proliferation in lab-based experiments
The next stages of the research will involve synthesising similar drugs with some modifications to try to improve their activity against UM cells.
An enormous thank you to the organisers for such an engaging, impactful and collaborative conference, which brought together both clinicians and scientists working in melanoma treatment and research. Thank you also to supervisors Dr Niamh O’Boyle (Trinity College Dublin) and Professor Breandán Kennedy (University College Dublin).
For more details, please click on the link to the video below: