Jobs & Opportunities

Survival of individuals with osteosarcoma, the most common primary bone cancer mainly affects teenagers and young adults, has not improved in the last 40 years since chemotherapy was introduced. The response to this toxic treatment is poor in nearly half of the treated patients, contributing significantly to their tumour returning, but the reasons for this failure have not been fully explained. Research into osteosarcoma has been significantly challenging due to the rarity of this disease and to the lack of good experimental systems to understand the causes of chemoresistance. Moreover, traditional drug testing using cancer cells in a dish and in small rodents have poor track records for identifying new treatments, because they are too dissimilar from the tumours.

With this project we will generate an osteosarcoma ‘organ-on-a-chip’, a novel experimental setup that replicates the bone environment inside a bone tumour.

This studentship has been funded by the Hannah's Willberry Wonder Pony Charity for Bone Cancer Research. Based in the Verbruggen Lab at QMUL, this PhD will be co-supervised by Dr Lucia Cottone, Fellow of the UCL Cancer Institute, and Prof Fiona Freeman, Associate Professor of Tissue Engineering at University College Dublin.