Research into Uterine Cancer Bursaries

Action on Womb Cancer is delighted to announce the award of our first two Research into Uterine Cancer Bursaries. The purpose of these awards, of £1,000 each, is to provide a springboard for aspiring early career researchers to develop their research interests and skills in womb cancer.

AWC Uterine Cancer Bursary Recipients

My name is Dr Inga Chen, I am a clinical research fellow in Gynaecologic Oncology at the Leeds Cancer Centre. I have a special interest in diabetes and how it is linked to endometrial (womb) cancer and this topic is what my PhD project is based on. My project aims to investigate differences in cancer cell signalling between patients with existing diabetes and patients without who have been diagnosed with endometrial cancer. I will mainly focus on the molecular signals that promote new blood vessel growth. This is important because this process enables these cancers to grow and spread throughout the body more effectively - a situation that can be affected by diabetes, as this condition can disrupt new blood vessel formation (even in the absence of cancer). My project aims to explore this link in patients with diabetes and to determine how this contributes to significantly poorer clinical outcomes. Understanding this process is the first step towards the development of new treatments which could improve survival in these patients.

Dr Inga Chen

My name is Dr Yong Sheng Tan. Like Inga, I too am a Clinical Research Fellow in Gynaecologic Oncology in the Cancer Centre at St James’s Hospital in Leeds. I am interested in both gynaecological robotic surgery and understanding the pathological mechanisms whereby reproductive tract cancers evade control by the immune system. My PhD project picks up one of these themes and focuses on determining how the different kinds of immune system cells recruited to endometrial (womb) cancers affect clinical outcome. I am therefore developing a new immune cell-based system for classifying endometrial cancers with the ultimate aim to see whether we can utilise this information to see which women might benefit most from immunotherapy – a relatively new treatment which boosts the immune system to fight cancer. Unfortunately, at present we do not know how to select which women might find this treatment most effective. Accordingly, my aim is to determine whether the immune cell-based classification system that I am developing could help oncologists to better deploy more effective, targeted therapies to endometrial cancer sufferers and improve overall clinical outcomes.

Dr Yong Sheng Tan

Future Bursary Opportunities

We are not open for applications for bursaries at the present time, but any future opportunities will be advertised here and on our social media.