4 April 2025

What is your role?

I’m a Haematology Registrar who has taken time out of training to do research. I am in the first cohort of the King’s Health Partners (KHP) Predoctoral Clinical Research Excellence Fellows. I have been working in Dr Reuben Benjamin’s Cellular Immunotherapy Lab. This experience helped strengthen my PhD funding applications and I am delighted to have been recently awarded  a Cancer Research UK Clinical Research Training Fellowship, which will enable me to pursue a PhD in the same lab. I am very grateful to KHP for helping to kick-start my research career.

What do you enjoy most about your role?

The Cellular Immunotherapy Lab is a very well-supported and enjoyable learning environment. I am thriving on the opportunity to investigate fundamental questions to enhance our understanding of blood cancers. My PhD will allow me to contribute to the rapidly evolving landscape of CAR-T cell therapy which is very exciting.

What inspired you to get into this work?

I have always been fascinated by the prospect of harnessing the immune system to fight cancers. CAR-T cell therapy involves reprogramming a patient’s or healthy donor’s T cells to target a tumour-associated antigen, resulting in cancer cell death. CAR-T therapy has recently achieved groundbreaking responses in relapsed/refractory B-cell acute lymphoblastic leukaemia (B-ALL), high grade B cell lymphomas and multiple myeloma.

My project is looking at overcoming resistance to CAR-T therapy in multiple myeloma, an incurable blood cancer. This is a highly relevant and impactful project with translational potential to improve quality of life and survival in patients with multiple myeloma.

What are the benefits of working in partnership?

Working in partnership allows me to collaborate with experts from different disciplines and institutions to maximise the potential of my project. For example, CAR-T therapy for multiple myeloma is not yet available on the NHS, however our transcampus collaboration with University Hospital Dresden enables access to bone marrow samples from patients treated there, which are of great value to my project.

What would be your top career tip?

Learn from mistakes! I am new to the lab environment and have a long list of mistakes I’ve made (some quite ridiculous). Each one has helped build my experience and optimise my experiments.

Find happiness in the journey, not the destination.

Find out more about KHP Haematology.