Sebastian Other-Gee Pohl has now completed his first year of his EACR-Boehringer Ingelheim Postdoctoral Fellowship, funding that is awarded for a period of up to three years to support excellent postdoctoral researchers in laboratories throughout Europe.
Sebastian is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Colorectal Stem Cell Transformation Lab (Kevin Myant Lab) at the CRUK Scotland Centre, Institute of Genetics and Cancer (IGC), within the University of Edinburgh. We recently caught up with him to hear about the progress he has made in his research during this first year.
Can you tell us about the topic of the research you are undertaking during your fellowship?
Overall, my research involves investigating whether targeting a specific RNA splicing factor can switch immune-cold colorectal cancers (CRC) into immune-hot tumours. In doing so, I aim to determine whether this splicing factor is a therapeutic target, and likely to increase the efficacy of immune checkpoint blockade therapies, which have incredibly low effectiveness in the majority of CRCs. To do this we are using conditional degron tags in vitro and in vivo to better model therapeutic intervention.
At this stage, how do you think the fellowship will be beneficial to your research and your career?
This fellowship, and the on-going support that BI have shown has been crucial in allowing me to comprehensively investigate what I believe is a very important research problem. It has also been a great experience to interact with scientists from BI and receiving their feedback as this project progresses. At this stage of my career this fellowship may prove to be instrumental in allowing me to advance into more independent research roles.
What have been the highlights from the first year of your fellowship?
The highlight would definitely be attending my first EACR conference, which happened to be in Torino, Italy. I was fortunate enough to be able to present my fellowship plan, and some preliminary data. The conference also gave me the opportunity to meet and thank in person, people from Boehringer Ingelheim and the EACR who helped me following acceptance of the fellowship.
EACR Postdoctoral Fellowships
To find out more about the EACR’s other Postdoctoral Fellowships, click here.
