Michael Dack, Professor Agamemnon Grigoriadis, Dr James N Arnold

Kings College London

Fully funded PhD project (October 2022 – October 2025)

BACKGROUND TO THE RESEARCH PROJECT

The project focuses on understanding and preventing the growth of cancer cells in osteosarcoma patients, as well as looking to stop the spread of cancer around the body. The ability of osteosarcoma to metastasise or spread to different sites is what makes it so aggressive and therefore focusing the research on this is really important. Michael is looking at repurposing a pre-existing drug, which is currently used to treat neonatal jaundice, to block the action of HO-1. HO-1 is a factor which is produced by osteosarcoma patients and prevents the activation of the immune system. By 'kick-starting' the immune system into action, the project will assess if the chemotherapy drugs are able to fight the cancer and stop it from moving to other areas of the body.

KEY RESULTS

Michael is now in his second year of his PhD and has been busy making progress on his project. Using a technique called Flow cytometry, Michael has been able to identify the key cell types within the lung that could be helping osteosarcoma spread to this site. Armed with this finding, Michael is now delving deeper into the mechanism of how these cells are helping the spread and how might the drug, SnMP, be working to reactivate good immune cells to prevent osteosarcoma metastasis.  

To share his research to potential collaborators, Michael attended EuSARC 2024 in June hosted in Le Pouligen, France and presented a 5-minute flash talk to an international audience of sarcoma researchers. Michael received excellent feedback from peers. In July, Michael also attended the Bone Research Society Annual meeting in Sheffield. Here Michael won the Best Poster award.