Thursday Seminar Series – Dr Barrie Peck

As part of the BCI’s Seminar Series, we are pleased to welcome Dr Barrie Peck from The Institute of Cancer Research to present at the BCI on Thursday 28^th March. For more information about Dr Peck’s research, please read the biography below.

The seminar will be titled: ‘Modelling the tumour microenvironment to identify novel targets in cancer’

The seminar will be held in the Lister and Young Seminar Room, 12.30pm – 13.30pm.

If you would like to arrange to talk with Dr Peck, please contact Denise Gardner (d.gardner@qmul.ac.uk).

Biography:

Doctor Barrie Peck studied Molecular Biology and Genetics at Royal Holloway before moving to Imperial College London to complete a PhD in studying the role and regulation of forkhead transcription factors in breast cancer. After this, he moved to the London Research Institute (now the Crick Institute) to the lab of Prof. Almut Schulze to study cancer metabolism. This work focussed on identifying novel cancer-specific dependencies in cancer metabolism. Indeed, as part of the Lipid metabolism consortium, they identified ACSS2 as a fundamental dependency of aggressive breast and prostate cancers. There are now significant efforts in developing small molecule inhibitors to target ACSS2 in cancer.

Dr. Peck then moved to the Institute of Cancer Research to the lab of Dr. Rachael Natrajan to identify novel tumour suppressors in breast cancer. At the ICR he has developed bespoke 3-dimensional screening pipelines and discovered novel genes that impact disease progression and response to targeted therapies. This work was recently awarded a BCN Catalyst grant in collaboration with Pfizer.

Dr. Peck has a keen interest in functional genomics, cancer cell metabolism and the impact extrinsic factors, such as diet, can have on disease trajectory in cancer.