Marco Pesce, Student in Cellular and Molecular Biotechnology at University of Trento, shared on LinkedIn:
“From July 20th to September 19th, I spent two months as a research intern at The Institute of Cancer Research (ICR) in London, in the Tumour Functional Heterogeneity Group. The experience was valuable above all because I saw how a major cancer research centre actually works, and how closely it operates with a large hospital like the Royal Marsden Hospital in Sutton. I also worked and spoke with researchers from all over the world, in a genuinely international environment.
The project, titled ‘Applying X-CODE clonal barcoding and functional assays to castration resistance in prostate cancer,’ sits at the intersection of tumor clonal heterogeneity and therapy resistance. I worked with barcoded prostate cancer models to track individual clones over time, running hormone-deprivation and drug treatments with viability readouts, sorting clones of interest by flow cytometry, and carrying out the molecular biology and sequencing preparation behind the barcode analysis. I also helped validate the spatial detection of the barcodes in a triple-negative breast cancer model. At the end of my stay, I presented the project to the lab.
Thank you to Dr. Marco Bezzi for taking me into his group, and above all to Roberto Rota, my supervisor, who followed me day by day and to whom I owe most of what I learned at the bench. Thank you also to Matteo Tartagni, Dr. Archana Thankamony and Dr. Florian Gabel, for their help and their patience.
I am now back at the Università di Trento for the Master’s in Cellular and Molecular Biotechnology, bringing with me a much sharper sense of the questions I want to work on.”
You may also be interested in: CIPHER Phase 2 Trial: Carboplatin in HRR-Altered Metastatic Castration-Resistant Prostate Cancer
