Hi everyone, my name is Maria Sharif and I work as a Research Scientist here at
one of the cancer immunotherapy labs. So I'll tell you a little bit more
more about myself first. So I've been at this university for about six years now.
I did my undergraduate studies here which was in Medical Science and then this was followed by me
taking a year out and working as a Data Manager at the Cancer Research UK Clinical Trials Unit here
and then recently I've completed a Research Masters in Cancer Sciences and I now work as
a scientist and I'm hoping to pursue a PhD and hopefully take up a career in academia and research.
So over the past few years there's been quite a lot of developments and progresses in the field
of immunotherapy for treating cancer and this involves harnessing the patient's own immune system
so that it can kill their own cancer. So for example the way we do this, there's various ways
of doing it, so for example you could engineer patients own immune cells such as T cells to
express a particular receptor called chimeric antigen receptor or, abbreviate you can, you can
abbreviate it into car. And these cars what they do is they recognise specific markers on the tumors
and then they target the T cells against the tumors and promote tumor killing. So there are
other immunotherapies out there so for example checkpoint blockade and monoclonal antibodies
but because I work specifically on the car T cells I can tell you a bit more about them.
So until recently, um, CAR T cells the work on CAR T cells and their use has been limited
to small number of clinical trials, um which are, which include largely patients with blood cancers
advanced blood cancers. However in 2017 some CAR T cell therapies have been approved by FDA. So for
example one therapy was approved for treating children with Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia and
another one was approved for treating adults with advanced lymphomas. And if you have been following
the news on the BBC it has been announced that in autumn 2018 CAR T cells have been approved on the
NHS for treating childhood leukemias which is very exciting and it's a huge milestone.
However a lot of this work is in the field of hematologic malignancies so blood cancers whereas
in solid tumors that hasn't been as much success because solid tumors they have some kind of
mechanism of resistance to and therefore they're not as susceptible to CAR T cell immunotherapies.
So the work that we do in this lab we engineer these T cells to express a car, that will allow,
that will target not the tumor markers specifically so it won't be so they won't be
the T cells won't be killing the tumors directly but instead the car that we put into our T cells
it will target the markers on the tumor vasculature and therefore the T cells would
destroy the blood supply to the tumors and this would prevent tumor from developing any further
and the tumor would eventually die. And this work is really exciting, uh, it's quite different,
um, so for example so solid tumors that I mentioned before are quite resistant so like colorectal
cancer or uh pancreatic cancer. So the work that we do in this lab has made a lot of progress and
I really enjoy working here and there is a lot of potential that this might go into the
clinical trial someday and so that's basically it so this is what we do so it's myself and my
colleagues we work together as a team and we engineer this T cells and by so doing we
make a massive difference and a large contribution to this fascinating field of cancer immunotherapy
and hopefully we will make a large difference to a lot of patients out there. So yes that's
it from me, thank you very much. If you've got any questions feel free to drop us a comment or also
you may I'm not sure if you have seen but I have a blog on Instagram called and I'm
called research diaries so if you find this at research.diaries on Instagram you can find out
more about my lab and myself and what I do and generally about what career in science actually is.