BSPR Lecturer

We are pleased to have Prof Sara Zanivan from the Beatson Institute for Cancer Research, University of Glasgow, as our BSPR Lecturer.

Sara’s main area of research is cancer biology. Her research focuses on understanding how the cells called cancer-associated fibroblasts (CAFs) contribute to tumour development and resistance to anti-cancer therapies., with the overarching goal to find ways to target CAFs to improve the success of anti-cancer treatments. Sara is fascinated by the biology of these cells, which have the unique ability to secrete myriad of proteins, such as extracellular matrix components, cytokines and extracellular vesicles, which play key roles to support cancer by influencing the behaviour of other cell types found in tumours, including cancer and immune cells. Her lab develops and uses MS proteomics approaches that can be used with both cell cultures and pre-clinical models and that have been fundamental to unravel new roles of CAF in cancer.

More recently Sara has developed an additional line of research to develop plasma proteomic methodologies for biomarker discovery. Sara leads the “Tumour Microenvironment & Proteomics” lab and the Advance Technology Proteomic Facility at the Cancer Research UK Scotland Institute in Glasgow and is Professor of Tumour Stroma Biology at the University of Glasgow.

In her role as BSPR Lecturer, over the coming year Sara will be presenting a lecture on “Harnessing cell metabolism to establish an anti-tumour stroma and for biomarker discovery”. In this lecture She highlights how MS proteomics can be used to achieve new levels of understanding in cancer biology, including to study cell extracellular matrix, the interplay between metabolism and protein synthesis, redox signalling, cell-cell communication and for the discovery of biomarkers of early cancer circulating in the blood.

To invite Sara to give a lecture please contact [email protected]