This PhD was part funded through the Knowledge and Economy Skills Scholarship 2 Programme which you can find out more about here
Study
The student used fruit flies to better understand how radiation treatment affects patients undergoing radiotherapy.
Results
The student identified a number of genes involved in the radiation response, though further work needs to be done to further confirm their role in the radiation response, they are promising and novel targets for potential future therapeutics.
Impact
Though this work has no direct impact on current cancer patients or their families, using flies instead of mice to perform biomedical research has a number of benefits such as more ethical and reduced cost. This reduced cost means that more projects can be funded and therefore more science performed, therefore using flies frees up funds that can be directed to other projects leading to more innovation in the field of cancer science.
Next Steps
The student is now employed as a researcher at the University of Bristol and now using flies to identify genes involved in inflammation.
A number of novel findings were made during the course of the project and will be shared with the scientific community in due course in the form of research papers.