Congratulations to PhD student Emma Couves for winning joint first place for her research talk

Emma is a third year PhD student who recently presented her research at the Life Sciences symposium. Here, Emma won joint first place and was awarded £100 Amazon vouchers. Working in collaboration with Dr Doryen Bubeck, this research aims to elucidate the mechanism of CD59 inhibition of complement membrane attack complex (MAC).

CD59 is a cell surface inhibitor molecule which prevents the MAC immune pore from killing healthy host tissue. Tumours often over express CD59 as a way of avoiding being killed by MAC. 

Recently, Emma has been working at the Diamond Light Source and developments here have revealed how the protein captures and prevents cell killing. With this new data in hand, Emma is trying to understand whether there are any protein-protein interaction sites that could be applied to a medicinal chemistry/drug discovery project. 

Following this, Emma has been invited to speak at the Faculty of Natural Sciences Research Showcase 2021.

 We would like to thank our funders (Cancer Research UK, EPSRC ICB-CDT, and European Research Council) and collaborators for their contributions. Congratulations, Emma!