Congratulations to CHIRI PhD candidate, Abhijeet Deshmukh (School of Biomedical Sciences) for receiving a position as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at MD Anderson Cancer Center.  The MD Anderson Cancer Center is one of the prestigious centres devoted exclusively for cancer research, patient care and education.  It is affiliated with University of Texas, Houston, Texas, USA.  Abhijeet will be working on the identification and characterisation of cancer cells that have undergone Epithelial-Mesenchymal Transition, either within the primary tumor or within blood. This is will include developing small molecule inhibitors to inhibit EMT and cancer stem cell properties for treating metastasis and preventing or treating the development of therapy resistance.During his PhD, under supervision of Prof. Dharmarajan and Prof. Newsholme, Abhijeet has investigated the role of sFRP4 in different hallmarks of cancer stem cells derived from breast, prostate and ovary tumors. With his research, he has demonstrated the association between aberrant Wnt signalling and cancer stem cells (CSC) and thereby shown that treatment of CSCs with sFRP4 can enable their chemo-sensitization and improve chemotherapeutic efficacy.

During the course of his PhD, Abhijeet generated 5 high quality first author publications either published or submitted and has obtained various awards for his presentations at conferences.  He will be submitting his PhD thesis in November 2017.

Please join us in congratulating Abhijeet and wishing him well on his future endeavours.