Dr Emma Nolan has won a three-year AMRF Sir Douglas Goodfellow Repatriation Fellowship to explore the interactions between obesity and breast cancer. She will be joining the Auckland Cancer Society Research Centre in 2022, where she will develop novel 3D organoid culture models from patient tissue to study cancer-adipocyte crosstalk. She plans to set up a bank of human breast tumour organoids using freshly-harvested adjuvant primary breast tumour resections. Organoids, or ‘mini-tumours in a dish’, are three-dimensional self-organised clusters of tumour cells that highly resemble the original tumour from which they were derived. Organoids can be efficiently generated from small amounts of tumour tissue, they can be grown rapidly in the laboratory, and they can accurately model cancer cell behaviour and drug response.
Her research will address a critical unanswered question in the breast cancer research field – how obesity contributes to tumour growth. This is particularly relevant in breast cancer, given the abundance of fat tissue in the breast and the clear evidence linking obesity with poor survival in breast cancer patients. She will explore the cross-talk between tumour cells and adipocytes in these organoid models. She will also collaborate with the Visvader/Lindeman group at WEHI in Melbourne to study fatty acid metabolism in BRCA1-mutated tissue.
Dr Nolan is an alumna of the University of Otago and completed her PhD at the Walter & Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research in Melbourne where she investigated breast cancer initiation and progression in women carrying a faulty BRCA1 gene. During her PhD, she pinpointed the cells that likely give rise to breast tumours in these high-risk women. She then took up a postdoctoral position at the Francis Crick Institute, London, investigating the response of the tumour microenvironment to radiation-induced lung injury and identified novel cancer-stromal cell interactions that boost metastatic growth. Dr Nolan has an impressive track record as an early career researcher with publications in Nature, Nature Medicine, Nature Cancer, Caner Research, Journal of the National Cancer Institute and Science Translational Medicine, as well as numerous awards and scholarships.