Georgia Millard

Georgia Millard

Email: gm3582@hallam.shu.ac.uk
Research Centre: BMRC
Research Group: Cancer Group and Sheffield Multimodal Imaging Centre
PhD Thesis Title: Elucidation of the Metabolic Landscape of Uveal Melanoma using Multimodal Imaging Mass Spectrometry
Director of Studies: Laura Cole
Supervisors: Neil Cross, Helen Kalirai and Karen Aughton                                                                              Collaborators: The University of Liverpool, Liverpool Ocular Oncology Group

SUMMARY

Georgia completed her masters in chemistry at Sheffield Hallam University, focusing on mass spectrometry imaging of uveal melanoma during her masters project.

Before that she completed a year in industry at Labcorp in the dose formulations and analysis departments where she gained valuable drug, formulation, liquid chromatography and analysis skills.

RESEARCH

Uveal melanoma (UM) is an intraocular cancer occuring due to mutations in GNAQ, GNA11, PLCB4 and CystLR2. Metastasis occurs in 50% of patients, often to the liver, due to mutations in BAP1 or SF3B1. As with many types of cancer it is important to understand the changes in metabolite and N-glycan distribution which may aid in the development and metastasis of cancerous cells. These changes can be studied using multimodal mass spectrometry imaging and multi-cellular tumour spheroids which mimic the tumour microenvironment.

Preliminary data suggests that the distribution of metabolites and N-glycans varies across different MCTS of different cell lines. High mannose type N-glycans are shown to be upregulated in cancerous tissue. The methods optimised for MCTS work will be used to acquire data from UM patient tissue samples to correlate the metabolomic and glycomic findings with patient data to inform future medicinal work.