Sarah Gooding

I joined the Vyas group in 2017 on an Oxford-Celgene Research Fellowship. Previously I studied undergraduate medicine in Cambridge, followed by Oxford for clinical training. My clinical haematology specialty training was also completed in Oxford. During this time I was a Wellcome Trust Clinical Research Fellow, studying for a DPhil in the Human Immunology Unit in the Weatherall Institute. This was supervised by Hal Drakesmith (HIU) and Claire Edwards of the Botnar Research Institute, and focused on the role of BMP signalling in the bone-lining tumour niche of the bone marrow cancer Multiple Myeloma.

My research on the Oxford-Celgene Fellowship concerns the tracking of myeloma in patient-donated samples at a single-cell level. By analysing mutational differences in clones and subclones of the tumour throughout disease progression, we aim to understand more about why it may respond but then relapse following different sequential therapies. In collaboration with the Opperman group at the Botnar Research Institute, we will integrate this approach with analysing changes in the composition of immune and other microenvironmental cell types, and their role in achieving disease remission.