Summer Student 2017: Evie Gruszyk

Evie Gruszyk, supervised by Dr Nicholas Peake at Sheffield Hallam University, developed a cell culture model to understand colorectal cancer without experimenting on mice.

There is a very clear link between fat and diseases that affect the colon. Particularly, fat build-up around the colon carries an increased risk of developing colon cancer. However, working with fat is difficult because fat cells are hard to grow in the large numbers needed for complex experiments, which means that research on fat is often done using experiments on mice.

In her project, Evie built a model of fat tissue using a unique human cell line that has been found to grow prolifically, to investigate how communication between fat tissue and cells of the colon cause an increased risk of developing cancer.

This model could provide researchers with a resource that will enable them to study how interactions between fat tissue and cancer cells determine cancer growth, instead of conducting experiments on mice.

Page last modified on June 13, 2019 12:21 pm