Dr Harriët Schellekens among UCC researchers awarded over €2 million in European funding to train highly skilled doctoral students

30 Aug 2024

Dr Harriët Schellekens (Project Beneficiary), Senior Lecturer in the Department of Anatomy & Neuroscience, University College Cork, and funded investigator with APC Microbiome Ireland, has recently received funding of €572,976 under the HORIZON Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA) Doctoral Networks programme awards for her research project ‘Advancing Research at the Intersection Between Gut Microbiota and Cancer Cachexia to Train Europe’s Future Leaders in Microbiota Medicine’.

Dr Schellekens and her team will advance personalized microbiota medicine as a new clinical approach to treat cancer cachexia in the project MiCCrobioTAckle. Cancer cachexia is a metabolic syndrome characterized by significant loss of skeletal muscle and adipose tissue, showing up in multiple cancer types, and research on cancer cachexia is urgently needed to improve clinical management of patients.

Cancer cachexia offers an exciting model to study the host-microbiota axis in the context of metabolic diseases. The elucidation of causal ties between the gut microbiota and cancer cachexia pathophysiology will pave the way for mechanistic understanding of the disease and for the development of advanced microbiome-based tools to fight cachexia in multiple cancers. It will also contribute to advance our knowledge on how the microbiome influences other metabolic diseases linked to dysregulated body weight (e.g., obesity, T2D, NAFLD).

The team will supervise two doctoral candidates to conduct experimental studies in mice models to validate causality and investigate microbiota-based therapeutic leads based on native and/or bioengineered microbes (single/consortia).

The first doctoral candidate will study the in vivo effect of specific microbial interventions on metabolic dysfunction, muscle strength and survival using a murine model of cancer cachexia, and will be cosupervised by Dr Rebecca Henry, in collaboration with the associate partner, Dr Begoña Muguerza from Universitat Rovira i Virgili, Tarragona, in Spain.

The second doctoral candidate will advance the mechanistic understanding between gut microbiota and cancer cachexia by studying a yet unexplored variable of circadian rhythmicity in this complex matrix. The two doctoral candidates at UCC will also undertake secondments with MS-Omics (Morten Danielsen) and SeqBiome Ltd (Marcus Claesson, Paul Cotter), respectively.

Photo: Dr Harriët Schellekens with project associate partner, Dr Begoña Muguerza

Professor John F. Cryan, UCC Vice President for Research and Innovation said: "Congratulations to the UCC researchers and their European colleagues in receiving funding awards through the HORIZON MCSA Doctoral Networks programme. This programme is important in the careers of early-stage researchers at UCC by providing research training to highly skilled doctoral candidates and enhancing their innovation capacity through exposure to academic and non-academic sectors."

Link:

https://www.ucc.ie/en/news/2024/ucc-researchers-awarded-over-2-million-in-european-funding-to-train-highly-skilled-doctoral-students.html

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News item and photographs Bereniece Riedewald