Sarah Gooding

I joined the Opperman group in October 2017 on an Oxford-Celgene Research Fellowship, on a joint project with the Vyas group at the Weatherall Institute, where I am also a group member. Previously I studied undergraduate medicine in Cambridge, followed by Oxford for clinical medical training. My clinical haematology specialty training was also completed in Oxford. During this time I was a Wellcome Trust Clinical Research Fellow, studying for a DPhil in the Human Immunology Unit in the Weatherall Institute. This was supervised by Hal Drakesmith (HIU) and Claire Edwards of the Botnar Research Institute, and focused on the role of BMP signalling in the bone-lining tumour niche of the bone marrow cancer Multiple Myeloma.

My research on the Oxford-Celgene Fellowship concerns the tracking of myeloma resistance development to IMiD drugs, in cell lines and patient-donated samples at a single-cell level. By analysing mutational differences in clones and subclones of the tumour throughout disease progression, we aim to understand more about why it may respond but then relapse following different sequential therapies. We will integrate this approach with analysing changes in the composition of immune and other microenvironmental cell types, and their role in achieving disease remission.