From Left: Yohanka Perera and Claire Palma
A warm welcome to Yohanka Perera and Claire Palma, PhD students from Auckland Cancer Society Research Centre.
Yohanka project title is ‘Unravelling the HER2+ breast cancer biology and drug sensitivity using two patient-derived 3D models’. She is supervised by Dr Emma Nolan and co-supervised by Associate Professor Stephen Jamieson.
Her research is based on unravelling the HER2+ breast cancer biology and drug sensitivity using two patient-derived 3D models – tumour organoids and tumour explants. Through her project, she hopes to generate, characterize and validate a biobank of HER2+ and HER2-low breast cancer organoids as a unique NZ-specific resource to study this disease in New Zealand.
Claire Palma project title is ‘Exploring the role of PHD inhibition in melanoma progression and therapy’. She is supervised by Dr Dean Singleton, Dr Tet-Woo Lee, and Associate Professor Stephen Jamieson.
Her thesis project is an exciting and innovative thesis project that focuses on exploring the role of PHD inhibition in melanoma progression and therapy. The project involves a combination of theoretical analysis, experimental investigations, and bioinformatic analysis of clinical datasets to uncover new insights and propose novel solutions to current challenges in melanoma therapy.