Targeting cancer dormancy in the bone microenvironment

Event details

About the speaker

Dr Alanna (Leni) Green is a Wellcome Trust Career Development Award and Yorkshire
Cancer Research Pioneer Advanced Senior Research Fellow. Her group, the Cancer and Bone
Lab at focuses on developing novel therapeutic strategies for targeting dormant,
chemotherapy-resistant cancer cells for incurable cancers in bone.

Leni graduated first-in-class from The University of Melbourne. She completed her PhD at
the St Vincent’s Institute of Medical Research, The University of Melbourne, Australia,
where she discovered retinoic acid receptors regulate bone biology and in turn blood cell
production. She completed postdoctoral positions at The University of Sheffield, in the
Sheffield Myeloma Research Team developing advanced preclinical models of myeloma and
showed a bone anabolic can heal myeloma bone disease. This was followed a position as a
Project Leader with Prof Thomas Helleday, leading a programme of work on new cancer
drugs targeting one-carbon metabolism enzymes, and discovered a new mechanism to kill
cancer cells by folate trapping. Her work has led to two first-in-man trials for karonudib and
TH9619.

The Cancer and Bone Lab is focused on using single cell multi-omics to characterise the
dormancy niche, and developing ‘dormalytic’ therapeutics to kill dormant cells, or
manipulate dormancy though modulation of the bone and immune niche.