Alfie Carter

I graduated from the University of Bath in 2020 with a BSc (hons) in Biochemistry, which included a placement year working in the Drug Metabolism and Pharmacokinetics (DMPK) team at Vertex Pharmaceuticals. I then joined AstraZeneca on the R&D graduate programme working on three separate 8-month projects all focused around improving cancer cell models for drug discovery. My main research interest lies in the development of cancer cell models that better recapitulate the complex tumour microenvironment (TME) and can be used for translational research.

In 2023 I began my DPhil under the supervision of Dr Eileen Parkes, working in collaboration with a biotech company called Theolytics. My DPhil project is about oncolytic viruses (OVs) which are viruses engineered to selectively replicate in and kill cancer cells. I will investigate the efficacy of oncolytic viruses in vitro in a range of cancer cell models. Within the Parkes lab, a key research topic is chromosomal instability (CIN) which can alter the TME and has emerged as a contributor to therapeutic resistance. My project will focus on how this intrinsic characteristic of cancer cells impacts OVs oncolytic ability. CIN is an underrepresented factor in cancer cell models so studying therapeutic efficacy on these models at the pre-clinical stage could help to identify patient cohorts that are more or less likely to respond to OVs.

The project also aims to study OVs in cell models that recapitulate the TME by incorporating cancer-associated fibroblasts (CAFs) which play a major role in the TME. The goal is to set up co-cultures of CAFs either with novel isogenic CIN cancer cell lines in 2D or with cancer organoids in 3D that can be used to evaluate OV infection, replication and killing in cancer cells and CAFs.