Incredibly grateful for the opportunity to present my PhD work at the #KSBarrierReg24 in Banff and honoured to receive the 'Kenneth Rainin Foundation' scholarship. Thankful to BSI Congress & Events and BSMB for the conference travel grants! Great science and even greater views 🙈 🏔️

On 15th April I will be taking on the Yorkshire three peaks challenge with BrainInflammationGrp to raise money for @NKMTrust who fund life saving brain haemorrhage research! Donate using the link below to help us support this worthy cause 🧠👩🏻‍🔬🩸 justgiving.com/page/brain-inf…

🏆Congrats to Postdoc Dr Amanda Ridley Amanda Ridley from the Douglas Dyer lab on winning the 2024 ICIS-Pfizer Amanda Proudfoot Tribute Award for Advances in Chemokine Biology by a Trainee! The award will help support writing applications & her career as a chemokine biologist!

Had a great few days in Portland, Maine attending the Gordon Research Conferences on Chemotactic Cytokines, It’s been a wonderful few days filled with great science! 🧬 Massive thanks to the organisers for inviting me to present my PhD work! ☺️ Lydia Becker Institute Science and Innovation at Cancer Research UK

The Dyersaurs! 🦖🦕

Delighted that the first co-supervised student from the lab passed her viva with flying colours and is sporting the new lab traditional hat that will become a glycocalyx of people, invented by student Ivy! WTCCMR

So pleased to share that I passed my viva yesterday! Thank you so much to my examiners Elaine Emmerson Kathryn Else, you truly made it an enjoyable experience. Thank you to Douglas Dyer and Tim for your great supervision over the last four years! I guess it’s Dr from now on!! 😄

It was such a pleasure to examine Nabina Pun yesterday as she comes to the end of her #PhD journey with Douglas Dyer. And particularly special to do it with Kathryn Else who was also my internal examiner! Congratulations Nabina, it was a really enjoyable day!

An apple a day keeps the Dr away👩‍⚕️💨 🍎 Excited to share that on Friday I passed my PhD viva! Thanks to my examiners @Jquintanalcala james whiteford for the grilling, and to my supervisors Douglas Dyer @saunderslab1 for their support the last 4 years. It’s been a blast 💜💛

So pleased to share the first study from our @CRUK Manchester Cancer Research Centre RadNet collab led by the amazing Nabina Pun with Travis Lab and Prof. Illidge Urszula Cytlak Chemokine Research Group Lydia Becker Institute WTCCMR biorxiv.org/content/10.110…

We firstly set out to establish a model of localised radiation induced damage to the intestine resulting in weight loss and increased intestinal permeability

We next used single cell RNA sequencing and flow cytometry to demonstrate RT induced chemokine mediated immune cell recruitment to the small intestine in mice and that this is likely also the case in human bladder cancer patients receiving RT

We then observed that in mice that lack the iCCR receptors (CCR1, 2, 3 and 5) and cannot recruit monocytes and eosinophils, RT induced toxicity was surprisingly worsened pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30784579/

To determine which of these chemokine receptors might be responsible for this worsened response to RT we used the newly developed iCCR reporter mice elifesciences.org/articles/72418 Revealing CCR2 as a prime candidate

We then used CCR2 deficient mice and monocyte transfer rescue experiments to demonstrate that CCR2 mediated monocyte recruitment is crucial to recovery from intestinal RT

Finally with the help of @Hepworth_Lab we demonstrated this protective effect of recruited monocytes was via their regulation of ILC3 cytokine production

Whilst most of our work was based in preclinical models we think these findings advance our understanding of intestinal responses to RT and may highlight one avenue to try and exploit in the future to improve patient responses to RT in the clinic.

This study was fantastically led by Nabina Pun working together with Urszula Cytlak. Nabina did an amazing job leading the charge into a new area for our lab and is now at the start of what is going to be a truly fantastic career in research, watch this space for more to come!