Finding time to think about an academic research career
when continuing with the busy clinical schedule is challenging.
The NIHR Biomedical Research Centre has committed funds to supporting
one-year fellowships to provide opportunities for trainees to generate
data and prepare a competitive research fellowship application for external funding.
This funding includes one year of salary as well as funding for laboratory
or research consumables and travel to conferences. Joining me today are two of
our BRC clinical training fellows, Lucy Durham and Natasha Hezelgrave.
Lucy, you're a Cambridge undergad, you did some clinical training at UCL and then did you core medical training.
What attracted you to this programme here at the BRC?
Well I've always been interested in combining clinical work with research but haven't
had any first-hand experience in the lab so I thought that this fellowship
would be the opportunity to have a year of lab research which would help me decide if
I'm any good at it and also enjoy it and hopefully generate some data so I can
have the perspective to apply for PhD fellowship in the future.
And I understand that you were still undecided about clinical specialties so
there was an interest I think in dermatology and also rheumatology,
so tell us a little bit about the the theme of your project.
So my project is looking at psoriatic arthritis.
which is a disease that affects the skin and joints.
So it was a good way of combining both of my potential clinical interests in one project.
And how did you find out more about the project before you started?
I emailed Leone who is my supervisor in the lab and arranged to meet her for
a discussion about the project and she answered all my questions and took me on a tour
of the lab and gave me the opportunity to meet other members in the lab so I could have
an informal chat about how it was to work in that particular department.
And the the laboratory skills that you picked up since you started?
Quite a lot, this time last year I hadn't even held a pipette I don't think.
So it was a steep learning curve.
The main focus of my project is isolating immune cells from the skin..from
sorry the joint, and also the blood from patients and healthy volunteers.
and then we culture cells and then see what proteins they make.
And we do that using analysers and also flow cytometry.
And the idea specifically used to try and define what about psoriatic arthritis
Well there's been a lot of research interest
currently at the role of IL 17 which is a protein that your immune cells make and its
role in psoriatic arthritis and there are some new drugs available that block out IL 17
that are currently undergoing clinical trial and the results are looking very promising.
And the aim of my projects to understand which cells of the immune system are responsive to the
main source of IL17 in this particular disease.
So what aspect of the fellowship do you think puts you in a good position to apply for funding in the future?
I've generated some preliminary data and I've also got a much better perspective of what we
research involves and what, how to structure a project and design
experiments to answer specific questions. I've also had the opportunity to write
two reviews over the course of this year and am currently, with my colleagues,
generating some data hopefully to go forward into a paper so this makes me more
competitive I think when I go through the application. Thank you.
So Natasha, you're a few steps ahead. Tell us about how the clinical training fellowship
helped you get to where you are now.
So I was an academic clinical fellow when I first started my obstetrics training
so I had a small amount of time each year to be devoted to research
and while that was really useful it allowed me to see lots of different projects to
decide what I want to do and find out about different methods of research
whether I even liked lab work, whether I wanted to do more epidemiological work,
but by the end of it I wasn't quite in a position to apply for a fellowship PhD
funding and so the BRC fellowship gave me a years devoted time including not
only my salary but consumables in order to pursue the premature birth project
which I'm now doing and so I generated pilot data I was able to work on the
fellowship application and hone my lab skills and my statistical skills
during that year to put me in a really strong position to apply for the NIHR
doctoral research fellowship which I was lucky enough to receive.
And I think you got some support and interview practice beforehand didn't you?
Absolutely. So the BRC were incredibly supportive of my future fellowship funding so had a number of
practice interviews, was able to talk through career pathways with them
and have access to some of their facilities to be able to pursue what we were doing .
So tell us a little bit about the research project.
So my interest is premature birth and why women go into premature labour
and whether we can predict it and indeed prevent it.
And there's quite a body of evidence that's implicating the innate
immune system into why women give birth early and we're looking at a particular
marker and natural antimicrobial peptide which we believe is, is raised in the
vagina fluid women who are destined to give birth early, and so we
are recruiting a large cohort of women at risk of preterm birth, by virtue of
their previous history, and we have created a biobank of vaginal samples as
well as blood samples and microbiology samples to be able to examine them and
not only look to see if this marker is predictive in preterm birth
but look at the mechanisms behind it.
Now you're stimulating research environment has allowed you to
get involved in some other studies too. Tell us very briefly about those.
My other interested public health and in particular women's
global public health and so when I started the department I was lucky to
get involved in a project looking at why women in low-resource countries
died from pre-eclampsia and also from bleeding and we've actually developed a
low-cost blood pressure monitor which the Gates have kindly given us funding to
pilot in a number of Sub-Saharan African countries and we've actually moved that
on now so, we've developed a device, we're piloting the device and the MRC have just
given us a million pounds to take that out as a randomised control trial.
So I'm lucky enough to be part of that as well alongside my PhD.
So you're gaining a lot of different types of experience in the industry of research environment.
Well Lucy, Natasha, thank you very much for telling us about your CTF projects. Thank you.
So two really good examples where the Biomedical Research Centre provides the research environment,
the mentoring and support to allow aspiring young clinical academics to
achieve their long-term goals.