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Many people aren’t aware that cancer, like bacteria and viruses, can be detected and eliminated by our body’s immune system. But our immune system isn’t nearly as good at dealing with cancer as it is at dealing with infection, because cancer cells tend to look a lot like our normal healthy cells, and so are often able to protect themselves using the same mechanisms that usually serve to protect our normal cells from immune damage. My work looks at one protein in the immune cells, called p110-delta, which seems to allow better killing of cancer cells when it is disabled – what does it normally do in the immune system (i.e. why does it stop immune cells from getting rid of cancer properly) and how can we make use of drugs against this protein to treat cancer patients?

It actually varies a lot! Some days I’m running around the lab from the moment I get in until the moment I leave (and those moments are rather more than eight hours apart…), those are the really busy days when all the experiments need to be done. Other days I only have a few loose ends to tie up in an experiment or two, and I spend several quiet hours sitting at my computer, making sense of my data, or catching up on the latest research articles. Most days are somewhere in between – so I need to be fairly organised to know what I’m doing on any given day!

(Or if I’m a bit less organised than I need to be, I end up taking notes on my glove – and then taking a picture of said glove for future reference…)