For International Women’s Day, IGC Bioinformatics Analysis Core Manager Dr Jing Su talks about her career and experience as a female leader. I come from China and was born and raised in Beijing, a city rich in history and heritage. Growing up in the capital, I was surrounded by centuries-old landmarks, with the Forbidden City […]

Image: Brothers Benjamin, seven, and Gabriel, three, both have ATR-X syndrome By Rebekah Tillotson, Chancellor’s Fellow at the Institute of Genetics and Cancer With Ben Harris and Jennifer Martinez-Harris, ATRX Research Alliance (a parent-led global group of families committed to accelerating research) ATR-X (Alpha-thalassemia X-linked intellectual disability) syndrome is a rare genetic disorder that affects […]

As a young girl growing up in the Palestinian city of Qalqilya in the West Bank, Roza Masalmeh always remembers wanting to do something related to science. “I loved science,” says Roza, a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Institute of Genetics and Cancer. “I wanted to be an inventor or discoverer. I was always doing […]

Image reference: Created using Google Gemini (1.5 Flash) Quick question, do you also aspire to become a scientist? If you dream of becoming a biomedical scientist, you probably picture yourself in a white lab coat, big goggles on your nose, surrounded by test tubes, and maybe even a few white mice nearby. Or, if space […]

There it was… I knew immediately that this was a path I wanted to take. Hello everyone! My name is Rowan and I am currently in the middle of my first year of the TRAM MB-PhD programme. I shudder slightly as I transition from saying start of my first year to middle of my first […]

Tammy Piper’s role as Tissue Bank Manager at the IGC came about both as a result of, and despite, her upbringing. The oldest of three children growing up in a dysfunctional family in Great Yarmouth, Norfolk, as a teenager she took to running away as things reached a ‘cooker pressure’ situation at home, often staying […]

By Daniel Thédié My one-week visit to the Institute of Genetics and Cancer was a great week filled with new experiences and interesting discussions. I am a postdoc at the School of Biological Sciences, working on DNA repair and bacteria. I use a lot of microscopy and image analysis, and I have been wanting to […]

How can early career researchers, such as PhD students, integrate the expertise of several labs into their research? This post aims to introduce why we research rare diseases, particularly craniofacial disorders, and share the experiences of students working across labs with complementary expertise. Congenital malformations are conditions which emerge early in development. Researching the genetics […]

By Dr Robb Hollis Ovarian cancer ‘Ovarian cancer’ is really an umbrella term for a collection of different cancers that we detect at or around the ovary. While we used to think these all represented the same disease, we now know  that there are multiple different types of ovarian cancer that each display unique clinical […]

Rare diseases are defined by the European Union as a disease or condition that effects fewer than 1 in 2000 people within the general population. Despite their individual rarity the sheer number of rare diseases results in a much higher figure as 1 in 17 people in the UK will suffer from a rare disease […]