Following an immunologist's dream to use the immune system to cure cancer WHEN Roisin Loftus decided she wanted to leave academia for a career in the pharmaceutical industry, working on medicines that treat different types of cancers, her mentors and peers were shocked. Academia can be an amazing place but for Roisin, she had her sights set on something else. “I loved the research and my PhD was a very positive experience, I had a brilliant supervisor and supportive lab environment. I was looking at a particular type of immune cell called a natural killer cell, which is at the forefront of our anti-cancer immune response. "I discovered that the way these cells break down nutrients is very important for their anti-cancer function. This is now a hot area of research, since there has been a shift in focus towards making medicines that support anti-cancer immune cells to fight cancer. Exciting research group “I heard about a professor that was coming from Harvard and she was interested in natural killer cells and was starting a lab in Trinity the year I was finishing my PhD. She was looking at them in the context of obesity. I knew I had to be a part of this exciting research group and started in her lab as a postdoc shortly after finishing my PhD. "I thoroughly enjoyed my postdoc and found it very exciting to be a part of the team that discovered 22 Education
natural killer cells in people with obesity don’t work properly. This is because they are full of fat - meaning that people living with obesity are at a much higher risk of developing cancer and other co-morbidities,” she says. She took what she learned and now works as a medical science liaison at Novartis, working on medicines that treat different types of cancers. The main focus is on a new type of personalized anti-cancer therapy. “It’s a really exciting therapy to be working on and I find the science behind it fascinating,” she says. Attack the cancer cells Roisin works on CAR T cell therapy - where they take the patient’s own T cells - a type of immune system cell - and change them in a laboratory to attack the cancer cells in the patient’s body. “I wanted to really take hold of my anti-cancer research experience and apply it in a very patient orientated way. I was always passionate about the concept of immunotherapy, where you unleash the power of someone’s immune cells to cure their disease. It’s an immunologists dream to use the immune system to cure the disease,” she says. Whilst in academia, one of Roisin’s favourite parts of the job was the communication aspect, “chatting through ideas at conferences” but she found it hard to step out of the
