Profile
Leanne Bradley
My CV
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Education:
I went to school in Northern Ireland. I then did my undergraduate in Human Genetics at Trinity College Dublin before doing my PhD in Oncology at the University of Oxford.
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Qualifications:
11 GCSES, 4 A-Levels, BA in Human Genetics, PhD in Oncology
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Work History:
At secondary school I was a waitress and a life-guard at a swimming pool. Then at university I did a bit of waitressing and bar tending.
During my summers at university I did some summer research positions/programmes which really helped me decide to pursue a career in research -
Current Job:
Post-doctoral researcher
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About Me:
I am a post-doctoral researcher at the University of Edinburgh studying brain tumours. I love music, travelling and baking!
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I live in Edinburgh with my husband but we are both originally from Northern Ireland and love to go back to visit as often as we can!
I play violin in a local orchestra and love going for walks on the beach.
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Unfortunately, a lot of people know someone who has had or has cancer. Cancer is a disease of the cells in the body, where they grow out of control and ‘steal’ nutrients and resources from the healthy cells.
The name ‘cancer’ can a bit misleading. This is because while cancer can occur anywhere in the body, a cancer in one organ is very different from a cancer somewhere else. For example, breast cancer is very different to pancreatic cancer, which is again very different from skin cancer. Even within the same organ there can be several different types of cancer – breast cancer is a good example of this, where several ‘subtypes’ of tumour have been identified. This makes cancer incredibly difficult to treat, and while one kind of treatment might work for one type of cancer, it will have no effect for others.
I work in a lab that is focussed on brain tumours and the tumour I work on is called glioblastoma. Glioblastoma is a very aggressive type of brain cancer which is incredibly hard to treat. The brain is a very special organ. Obviously, it is absolutely essential for us to live – but also, it is well protected not only by the skull but by a special structure called the ‘blood brain barrier’. These special features of the brain have made it particularly hard for standard cancer treatments to have any success (such as chemotherapy or surgery to remove the tumour), and patients who get brain tumours have limited options when it comes to treatment.
Recently, there has been incredibly exciting advances in a cancer treatment known as ‘immunotherapy’. Immunotherapy involves the immune cells – these are special cells in the body that normally function to protect us from things like infections, but they also patrol the body on the lookout for cells that have gone ‘bad’ and might lead to a tumour and they destroy these cells. Cells that become cancerous overcome this patrolling duty of the immune cells. A way that they can do this is to ‘trick’ the immune cells into not recognising that they have gone bad or even getting the immune cells to help them grow even more. Immunotherapy works by getting immune cells working properly again so that they will attack and destroy the cancer cells.
Immunotherapy has been revolutionary for some cancers, but not others – including glioblastoma. However, it has been so effective in some cases that scientists are determined to harness the power of immunotherapy for as many cancers as possible! This means that we need to understand the ‘microenvironment’ of the tumours better. The microenvironment is the space that the tumours grow in and includes all sorts of non-cancerous cells, such as the immune cells but also things like the blood vessels.
My work focusses on trying to figure out what the microenvironment is like for glioblastoma tumours, with a particular interest in the immune cells that are there. I am trying to figure out how the tumour cells effect these immune cells and in turn, how the immune cells effect the tumour. If we can figure this out, then it might help us develop successful immunotherapies for brain tumours!
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My Typical Day:
When I arrive at the lab I will check my emails and my plan for that day! Then I will start preparing my things so they are all ready for my experiments, and then I get going!
Some days I will have to do some microscope work and have results that I need to analyse. In the times in between I will try and read some research done by other labs or have a coffee with my lab mates. -
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When I get to the lab I usually check my emails and my plan for the day. Then I will warm up my reagents that I need to care for cells (they stay in the fridge but need to be warm for experiments!). I check on my cells and decide if they look ready for doing experiments on. At this point, I have a very important coffee while I make notes about the experiment in my lab book and then I will go to start my experiment or continue with ongoing cell experiments. My experiments not only include the work with the living cells, but also with the proteins or DNA/RNA that I extract from them, or I will take microscope images – these parts of experiments I usually do after lunch time, but every day is so different it is impossible to have a ‘typical’ day.
Some days our department organises seminars/talks by visiting researchers or by the researchers in our building. These can be anything from the 1st year PhD students to the professors so they are a good way to learn what’s going on in lots of different research fields! Every week we will also have a lab meeting where my lab mates will present their recent experiments to everyone in the lab including the boss, also we have ‘journal club’ where we take it in turns to present and discuss papers published by other groups that are relevant to our research. In fact, presenting and discussing research is so important we also have a yearly ‘lab retreat’ as well as an ‘institute retreat’ where we go for one or more days to have intensive research presentations as well as team building activities! Also, an exciting part of my job is going to conferences for the same reason – so a couple of times a year I will go a conference and have gone to several all over Europe since I started working as a scientist.
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My Interview
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How would you describe yourself in 3 words?
Friendly, passionate, clumsy
What did you want to be after you left school?
A Dentist (but so glad I didn't do it!)
Were you ever in trouble at school?
Rarely and never in much!
Who is your favourite singer or band?
Snow Patrol
What's your favourite food?
Chinese takeaway
If you had 3 wishes for yourself what would they be? - be honest!
To move back home, to help improve the lives of sick patients with my research and to not care so much about what other people think of me
Tell us a joke.
What did the magic tractor do? Turned into a field!
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