Dr Isabel Romero-Camarero has been awarded a prestigious Kay Kendall Leukaemia Fund Junior Research Fellowship. This fellowship programme supports outstanding individuals wishing to pursue research into haematological malignancies.

Working as a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Leukaemia Biology group led by Professor Tim Somervaille, Isabel focuses on myeloid malignancies and has been working on a protein called FOXC1- which acts as a transcription factor that turns genes on and off. She has been elucidating its mechanisms of de-repression in acute myeloid leukaemia (AML), a type of blood cancer. FOXC1 is not expressed in normal blood cells but is frequently expressed in AML.

The project to be funded by KKLF aims to understand how FOXC1 is turned on in AML, which in the longer term it is hoped will lead to new treatment approaches to turn gene expression off, allowing AML cells to resume more normal differentiation.