Jen Morton is a group leader at the CRUK Scotland (formerly Beatson) institute and and Professor in the University of Glasgow School of Cancer Sciences. Jen qualified with a BSc in Medical Biochemistry from the University of Glasgow in 1998 and gained her PhD in Molecular Oncology in 2002. She carried out postdoctoral research at the University of Glasgow and then, from 2004 -2007, at the University of Massachusetts Medical School, at which time she started to specialize in pancreatic cancer research. In 2007 she joined the CRUK Beatson Institute where she now leads a lab focused on research into pancreatic cancer. The main aims of her work are to find out more about how pancreatic cancer behaves, identify new ways to treat the disease, and test those new treatments in the best model systems. She has published over 130 papers which have demonstrated insights into pancreatic cancer biology, how pancreatic cancers spread, and how the ‘normal’ cells in the body can be hijacked by pancreatic tumours to support their growth and render them insensitive to most therapies. She works with both academic and industry collaborators around the world to test new therapies in pancreatic cancer and guide new, more effective clinical trials. For the talk, she will speak about the work that she and colleagues do in her lab, discuss why pancreatic cancer is so aggressive and difficult to treat, but also hopefully highlight how recent progress is giving some cause for optimism (in lay terms).
Jen Morton