A RESEARCHER from the University of Dundee has been awarded a prestigious fellowship to investigate cellular decision-making processes and potentially unlocking new treatments for various diseases.
Dr Ralitsa Madsen, who works in the School of Life Sciences at the Scottish university, has been granted £1.8 million in funding over the next four years by securing a UK Research and Innovation Future Leaders Fellowship.
The funding will enable her to explore the PI3K pathway, which plays a crucial role in cellular functions, and is linked to disorders such as cancer and human overgrowth syndromes.
Dr Madsen’s research aims to detail and map out the complex circuits regulated by the PI3K pathway and gain a better understanding of how mutations affect cellular decision-making.
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She compares the PI3K mutation to a musical instrument and when they mutate, they “stop playing the right tune”.
Instead of shutting down the system, as current therapies do, Dr Madsen’s research aims to repair it to “play the right tune” once again.
Her work will involve developing a new method using stem cells to track and measure signals in different cells over time and aims to team up with experts from around the world to help with her research.
The fellowship also includes funding for a state-of-the-art piece of equipment called Cytometry by Time of Flight which analyses multiple molecules in thousands of individual cells, quickly and accurately.
Dr Madsen (below) said she will champion the fellowship’s research culture by applying curiosity and passion for learning to her studies.
She said: “I am humbled and incredibly grateful for receiving a UKRI Future Leaders Fellowship.
“It is a career-changing event and one that will provide my research group with the time and resources required to deliver a step change in our understanding and ability to target a fundamental disease-causing circuit in human cells.
“As the name suggests, this Fellowship also comes with leadership responsibility, one that I will honour in several ways, including by working tirelessly to champion a healthy research culture, a culture that celebrates rigour and quality over quantity, and one that instills curiosity and passion for learning in our young researchers early on in their academic journeys.”
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Dario Alessi, director of the MRC Protein Phosphorylation and Ubiquitylation Unit, said he is extremely impressed with Dr Madsen’s pioneering approach to researching.
He said: “I congratulate Ralitsa for the award of this prestigious fellowship. She has worked extremely hard to achieve this, and it is richly deserved.
“Ralitsa is incredibly talented and laser-focused on unravelling the intricate biology of how the PI3K pathway is regulated at the single-cell level to control diverse cellular decisions and how this information can be harnessed to develop better treatments for disorders of human growth and cancer.
“I am also extremely impressed with the pioneering mathematical, physics and computational approaches that Ralitsa is harnessing with the support of collaborators to understand how biology is controlled at the single-cell level. Her work synergises so well with much other ongoing research within the MRC PPU and beyond.”
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