Training
We welcomed Hannah O’Toole to the team in February 2025. Hannah is a research assistant on the TALenT project and co-manages the recruitment of patients and co-ordinates the biobanking of the longitudinal blood samples received on the project. Dr Ezgi Oner is the post-doctoral scientist on the TALenT project and she supported Hannah’s training in the laboratory prior to moving to the laboratory in JHU.
Secondments between All-Ireland and TransAtlantic partners is an integral part of TALenT’s education and training programme and will provide a unique opportunity for significant career development for researchers.
Dr Ezgi Oner is the first TALenT cofunded postdoctoral fellow to travel to Prof Valsamo Anagnostou’s molecular oncology laboratory, at the Sidney Kimmel Cancer Center at Johns Hopkins University (JHU) from Dr Kathy Gately’s laboratory at the Trinity St James’s Cancer Institute (TSJCI). Prof Anagnostou has a keen focus on mentorship and career development of lab members and employs a personalized mentorship approach. Dr Oner’s specialised training, generously supported by Anagnostou and JHU, will establish an impactful mechanism for inter-organisational, knowledge exchange between research leaders at the Sidney Kimmel Cancer Center and multiple All-Ireland Cancer Centres and academic partners. Prof Anagnostou is a world leader in the field of liquid biopsies with a long track record in ctDNA technology development and implementation of liquid biopsies in clinical decision making for patients with cancer. Leveraging lab discoveries, her group has instigated the first ctDNA molecular response adaptive clinical trial of chemo-immunotherapy for NSCLC (NCT04093167). This collaboration between Prof. Anagnostou and All Ireland partners will enable multimodal analysis of ctDNA methylation/fragmentomic signatures to be completed, on a cohort of longitudinal samples from patients with resectable lung cancer using novel technologies and innovative analytical frameworks.
