2017 Research Grant Award
£125,526 for a 48 month PhD project to start 1 Jan 2018 at Quadram Institute Bioscience, Norwich Research Park.
Grant Applicants:
Dr Lindsay Hall
Dr Stephen Robinson
Breast cancer (BC) is a common disease, which can be deadly. For many years, we have known that what we eat affects the risk of getting breast cancer later in life. However, in recent years there is also some evidence that the bacteria which naturally live in our gut can also have an impact on surviving breast cancer.
Antibiotic drugs can kill off some of our gut’s “good” bacteria. Some of our preliminary pre-clinical research has shown that when the diversity of bacteria in the gut is reduced by antibiotic treatment, tumours seem to grow larger and more quickly than when normal healthy levels of bacteria are present.
In the research proposed here, we aim to understand:
How gut bacteria in BC patients are affected by antibiotic treatment
How microbe changes correlate to anti-cancer immune responses and clinical readouts
How specific microbes interact with the gut and tumour using cell culture models
