DEVELOPING NEW TOOLS IN THE FIGHT AGAINST CANCER MARTIN FELLERMEYER O X F O R D T H AT C H E R S C H O L A R
Martin Fellermeyer is a third year doctoral student and Oxford Thatcher Scholar based at the Weatherall Institute of Molecular Medicine. We visited him there to learn more about his work developing life-saving cancer therapies, and how the support of the Margaret Thatcher Scholarship Trust has galvanised his work both in and outside the laboratory. Unlike a virus or bacterial infection, cancer is an intrinsic pathology: it arises due to problems with our own cells. Considering that the human body consists of around 37 trillion cells, any of which can develop into a tumour cell, it didn’t take long for me to become fascinated as an undergraduate by the mechanisms of how our body stops the ‘natural’ build-up of cancer cells. Most importantly, I came to believe that understanding these processes could translate into more effective drugs to treat patients in the clinic – this was the starting point for all my research. Generally, a cancerous cell is one of our own cells that developed mutations in its genetic material (the DNA), which lead to changes and perturbations of the cell’s behaviour, most importantly an increase in cell divisions that allows the tumour to grow. Luckily, there are different ‘self-defence’ systems in our body that aim to prevent exactly this from happening. Firstly, our cells are constantly scanning themselves for injuries, such as missing or broken DNA, and seeking to repair themselves. If a cell is unable to repair itself, it will voluntarily die in order to prevent further damage to the body. That is why developing cancer cells seek not only to increase growth rate through DNA mutations, but also to manipulate DNA damage detection machinery and prevent cell suicide. Secondly, if a cell’s intrinsic protection mechanisms fail, there are also extrinsic mechanisms in place to reduce the chance of tumour development. Most importantly, immune cells travel through our body looking for ‘different’ cells, including cancerous ones. A developing tumour will always seek ways to evade these protection mechanisms. Conventional chemotherapy is not designed to support these protection mechanisms with much accuracy: it simply kills all quickly growing cells, leading to the familiar side effects of hair loss and gastrointestinal problems as gut and hair cells are also targeted due to their fast cell growth. That is why there has been a lot of interest in finding drugs that target the different protection mechanisms of our own body in an effort to ‘re-activate’ them. I hope my research will play a part in this important work. Specifically, my DPhil aims to develop novel drugs
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