Leeds Beckett University - City Campus,
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Professor Jim Boyne to talk about twenty-five years of cancer research in inaugural professorial lecture
Professor Jim Boyne, Head of Biomedical Science in the School of Health, is holding his inaugural professorial lecture – Exploring alteRNAtive approaches in the fight against cancer - in which he will present his twenty-five years of cancer research. During the lecture he will cover topics ranging from the tactics used by viruses to cause cancer through to more recent work investigating how tumour cells ‘talk’ to one another.
Jim grew up in Leeds and was the first in his family to go to university. He graduated from the University of Sheffield in 1996 and following a research post at Sheffield Children’s Hospital he undertook a PhD and since then has been active in research.
He started his research career investigating at the molecular level how cells divide which led to an interest in cancer, which broadly speaking is a disease caused by uncontrolled cell division.
“Cancer research encompasses a huge range of approaches. Our work aims to identify new pathways that contribute to the progression of cancer, and as such might represent new drug targets. We are also very interested in whether key molecules important in cancer progression can be used to track cancer spread and response to treatment.
“Historically, work in my group has focused on the early discovery phase of cancer research, however, recently we have focused more on projects investigating biomarkers for cancer metastasis that, if successful, might have more direct benefits for patients.
“In terms of our biomarker discovery work, a major challenge is finding the ‘needle in the haystack’ that tells doctors how a patient’s cancer is progressing. We are currently collaborating with colleagues based in the NHS and at Harvard University in the USA to enable us to identify very rare biomarkers from just a single drop of human blood via a process known as microfluidics.”
Jim is a Fellow of both the Institute for Biomedical Sciences and Royal Society for Biology, and a Senior Fellow of the HEA. His research interests are based around ribonucleic acid (RNA) Biology and human disease – RNA is a nucleic acid present in all living cells that has structural similarities to DNA. He has published numerous articles in this area, receiving funding from the Royal Society, Skin Cancer Research Fund, Breast Cancer NOW and the British Skin Foundation.
To book a place on Professor Boyne’s inaugural professorial lecture on Wednesday 8 February, please click here.
Professor Jim Boyne
Professor Boyne is Head of the Biomedical Science subject group and PI for a team of cancer researchers in the Centre for Biomedical Science Research. He is a fellow of the IBMS and RSB and Senior Fellow of the HEA.
