2024: Charlotte Brierley
Dr Charlotte Brierley is an Academic Clinical Lecturer at the University of Oxford, a position which enables her to combine the completion of her clinical training in haematology with academic research. Charlotte states: ‘I’m enormously grateful for the support of my supervisors, collaborators, colleagues, and the fantastic environment we have here at the WIMM and in clinical haematology at OUH to enable me to pursue this dual career.’ Her research aims to understand how patients with myeloid leukaemias develop the disease, and why some respond to treatment better than others.
Charlotte studied Pathology in Cambridge and completed her clinical medical training at Oxford. She then embarked on dual training in clinical and academic haematology, first as an Academic Foundation doctor in Edinburgh and later as an Academic Clinical Fellow in Oxford.
In 2019, Charlotte was awarded a Wellcome Trust Clinical Research Fellowship to pursue a DPhil in the haematopoietic stem cell biology group at the MRC WIMM, supervised by Professor Adam Mead and Dr Bethan Psaila. Here she focused on using single cell approaches to understand the genomic, proteomic and transcriptomic changes in blast-phase myeloproliferative neoplasms, a particularly aggressive type of acute myeloid leukaemia. During her DPhil, Charlotte undertook a two-year visiting fellowship in computational oncology at Dr Elli Papaemmanuil’s laboratory at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Centre in New York. Charlotte identified a recurrent genomic abnormality termed chromothripsis in a cohort of clinical trial patients undergoing treatment for blast-phase MPN. She went on to fully characterise this genomic event and identified a new tractable therapeutic target in this area of unmet clinical need, which is now being pursued in clinical trials.
Charlotte says: ‘Current treatments for acute leukaemia are very intense, cause many side effects, and far too often are inadequate to control the disease. At this time of enormous progress in our understanding of molecular biology and disease processes, it is hugely gratifying to work at the intersection of clinical, translational and basic scientific research.’ Her research aims to unravel mechanisms of disease progression and therapy resistance, to provide a foundation for the development of novel therapeutic targets to help patients with myeloid disease.