In October 2019, Prof Eccles appointed Dr Magda Ratajska as NZICRT Research Fellow in his laboratory. Dr Ratajska is a Polish researcher, who has established herself in the field of breast/ ovarian cancer. Magda has a strong focus on translational research, especially with regard to identifying mutations in genes involved in cancer.
The support provided by the NZICRT Postdoctoral Research Fellowship has allowed Magda to strengthen her research activities in the breast/ ovarian cancer field, and to establish a new lung cancer project. This work done by Magda has led to initiation of an official collaboration between Otago University and the Medical University of Gdansk, Poland.
Dr Ratajska is carrying out multiple projects in Prof Eccles laboratory;
Projects:
“A blood test for the early detection of lung cancer” – Dr Ratajska has successfully completed whole-genome methylation profiling (The Infinium MethylationEPIC Array, Illumina) of 60 cancer samples and 60 corresponding healthy lung tissues. She is presently validating results using MiniSeq assays and preparing the results for publication. For this project, Magda was responsible for negotiating the purchase of an Illumina MiniSeq sequencer, and together with Rob Weeks, she has helped develop a new NGS facility at the Department of Pathology.
“BARD1: a new prognostic marker for triple-negative breast cancer (TNBC)”. Magda initiated a collaboration with her long-time collaborator prof Rodney Scott (University of Newcastle, Australia), prof Fergus Couch (Mayo Clinic). As part of this collaboration, she will have access to a large cohort of well characterised TNBCs (~500 samples), and it is anticipated this will result in high statistical power for the proposed study.
