Staff members

Following her PhD in cancer immunology, Lucia joined us to explore the molecular basis of sarcoma using in vitro cellular models. She works to identify novel therapeutic agents for chordoma with a specific focus on drugs that target the epigenetic regulation of cancer cells. She also investigates the functional impact of genetic alterations which are found in osteosarcoma, utilizing cellular models and genome editing techniques such as CRISPR/Cas9. This work is funded by The Chordoma Foundation.

Currently working on a project aimed at developing a blood-based test for detection of small tumour-derived fragments (known as circulating tumour DNA or ctDNA) in the blood from osteosarcoma and chordoma patients. This will be the first step towards applying circulating tumour DNA analysis to monitor disease status, response to neoadjuvant therapies, and to detect residual disease in patients with osteosarcoma and chordoma. This work is funded by the Tom Prince Cancer Trust.

Inga is a clinical PhD student whose research is focussed on the genomics of chordoma. She is an aspiring spinal surgeon and has helped establish the UK National Chordoma Cohort Study. She is using the CRISPR / Cas system to investigate the function of a germline variant found in nearly all patients with chordoma and will be exploring the germline and somatic landscape of chordoma using data generated by the 100,000 Genomes Project and the National Cohort Study. Inga is funded by Chordoma UK.

Will joined us and the Genomics England Sarcoma GeCIP team in 2019. After working for 6 years in clinical genetics, Will completed his PhD at Bart’s which involved exploring the clonal evolution of colorectal cancers and its premalignant forms. His aims are to contribute to the analyses planned within the wider sarcoma GeCIP, but he will also focus on understanding the clonal evolution of certain subtypes such as chondrosarcoma.

Steven is a computational biologist, investigating mutational signatures of sarcoma genomes collected in the 100,000 Genome Project, as well as differential expression analysis of bulk RNASeq data from sarcomas. His focus is on the mechanisms of telomere maintenance, which is funded by Sarcoma UK. He gained his PhD at Queen Mary University of London and has MSc degrees in Bioinformatics (Imperial College), Audio Acoustics (Salford), and Computer Science (Edinburgh).

Maia is funded by Tom Prince Charity and is co-ordinating the RNA sequencing and epigenetic studies on osteosarcoma.

Lorena is working on cellular models of sarcoma.

Lily works as a project manager for the England Bone Pathology Network lead by Professor Adrienne M Flanagan and is based at UCL and the Royal National Orthopaedic Hospital.