By Annamaria Gal

The new academic year brought us new project students and new challenges. When I think back to the work with my last year project students, I cannot help but wish myself similar students this year with the same level of lab skills, diligence and motivation. Yes, I was very satisfied with my last year project students. One had excellent practical skills, the other one outlined such an integrative approach to molecular pathology, the third one was just so motivated and good humoured, and the fourth one worked extremely hard to improve their performance. Our work together culminated not only in highly successful poster presentations and viva, but also in the students’ progress to further studies which I, indulging myself with the thought, might have also contributed to, at least, by writing the reference letters.
An excellent opportunity also came along that made me consider taking some of our results to the world stage of science. With one of my undergraduate students, Christopher Wignall, I submitted an abstract to a prestigious meeting of the Cell Symposia: Cancer, Inflammation and Immunity. The conference took place in Sitges, Spain, from 14th to 16th June, 2015.

Chris was working on targeting tumour promoting macrophages in an in vitro model. He blocked chemokine receptors on macrophages, differentiated into a tumour promoting phenotype, in transmigration assays. The reduction in the number of transmigrated macrophages in response to different chemokine receptor inhibitors reflected the importance of the project: finding new targets for anti-cancer therapy. Chris’s results complemented my in vivo data which eventually resulted in a poster with the following title: ‘Comparison of antitumoral and protumoral macrophage migration by targeting differentially regulated chemokine receptors.’

Renowned scientists of the field gave talks at the conference, including Lisa Coussens, Alberto Mantovani, Jeff Pollard and Fiona Powrie. Chris didn’t miss a single talk, and I think it was after Lisa Coussesns’s presentation when his sigh was most expressive: ‘Why didn’t this conference take place before I needed to write up my project report? ’ Then he added with a smile: ‘Of course, I read their papers. I have known these speakers for some time. It’s nice to meet them after all.’

The poster presentation was a hot and crowded event. Although the temperature barely reached 24°C, it felt like over 30°C because of the sticky humidity. Nevertheless, people were very active around the posters. We also attracted quite some audience. To make our life easier, Chris started the poster presentation with his in vitro data and I finished with my in vivo results. When I had the chance, I escaped, leaving the whole poster for Chris, so that I could catch up with old macrophage friends and prospective collaborators. The exhaustion that came over us after the poster session was immense.

Fortunately there was a tireless colleague in our company, who represented T cells at the conference: Nadia Terrazzini. Her culinary instinct led us every night to a very good restaurant along the beach where we relaxed in the cool sea breeze waiting (not long) for our seafood to arrive. During these moments we received lots of additional feedback from Chris about his experience at our university. We also made it sure to provide him with a lot of good advice for his future. My efforts to secure him for my research were not entirely successful though. He insisted to go on to do an MSc in either pharmacy or translational medicine. Nadia thought he could still do research with me later, after his MSc studies.
Well, wherever his future takes him, he will be fine. I am happy that he had a truly enjoyable time while working on his project, and a reassurance that his work was appreciated not only by the university community, but also a bigger forum of devoted macrophage scientists.

Chris is currently studying MSc Translational Medicine at King’s College London.