People

Fiona Oakley

There is an urgent need to further understand the biology of liver cancer and develop new drugs for the treatment of this disease. Animal models and cell cultures do not mimic the human disease, because mice are not humans and human cells grown in 2D on plastic dishes do not recreate the complex 3D interactions between the cancer cells and the different types of liver cells found within the tumour-liver environment. Therefore, understanding the disease biology and developing effective drugs in these models can be challenging. As part of our research, we are creating a new human liver cancer culture model, which does recreate the interactions between cancer cells, liver tissue and immune cells. This is achieved by adding small balls of liver cancer cells to very thin slices of human liver and then growing them in a special bioreactor. The cancer cells invade and grow within the liver slice and these slices can then be bathed in different drugs to ask if the drug can slow the growth of the cancer cells. We can also add immune cells to our liver cancer slice model to study the biology of these cells and ask if they affect cancer cell growth.

You can view her University webpage here, and her page on the Newcastle Fibrosis Research Group here.