Congratulations to third-year Natural Sciences student, Yuexuan Zhang, who has won the 2024 Alkis Memorial Fund Prize for earning the highest Part II Project mark in her cohort following some fantastic work completed in the Machesky Lab.
Yuexuan spent two months in our lab, researching the therapeutic potential of Src inhibitors in metastatic Pancreatic Ductal Adenocarcinoma (PDAC), one of the most lethal and intractable types of cancer, with a less than 10% 5-year survival rate. By the end of her project, Yuexuan was able to demonstrate in vitro that Src inhibition using Dasatinib significantly reduces the migratory capacity of PDAC-A cells, a cell line derived from a mouse model of PDAC. She further confirmed that this was due to a reduction in Src phosphorylation at key residues modulating downstream interactions required for both random and collective migration, and observed key morphological changes to PDAC-A cells following Dasatinib treatment.
Yuexuan would like to thank all members of the Machesky lab for their kind encouragement during her project, in particular her supervisor, Laura Machesky, and day-supervisor Lisa Dobson, for their excellent guidance and support. It is without a doubt that she will carry forward all she has learnt in the Machesky lab into her future projects as she progresses on to her part III studies this October. After graduating, Yuexuan hopes to complete a PhD in the field, aiming to integrate biochemical, biophysical, and computational tools to unravel the molecular structures and mechanisms that drive the remarkable, dynamic activity of cells.
We wish Yuexuan the very best of luck for her final year and forthcoming PhD applications!
The Machesky Lab 