Ed will be researching the development of cancer cachexia, a major complication arising in a large proportion of advanced cancer patients. More generally he will be looking at how the development of the cancer stroma may relate to other changes in normal physiology associated with cancer.

Ed was first at Christ’s College as an undergraduate where he received my BA in Natural Sciences specialising in Immunology, Microbiology and Parasitology. Subsequently he moved to King’s College to join the Wellcome Trust 4 year PhD programme in Infection and Immunity. After the first year in which he worked in a variety of labs covering subjects from bacteriology through to stem cell development his interest was piqued by how tumours survive in the face of an active immune response. As a result he moved into the lab of Professor Fearon for his PhD project and started looking at the role of the FAP-expressing stromal cell in maintaining local immune suppression at the tumour site (this work has since been published in Science in 2010). He then developed a new mouse model allowing the in vivo imaging of these cells and found them in a variety of sites leading to his current research focussing on the normal physiological roles of the FAP-expressing cell and examining how this is altered during cancer development. Currently he is investigating whether FAP-expressing cells are lost from peripheral sites during tumorigenesis and whether this accounts for the development of cancer cachexia, a debilitating complication arising in a large proportion of advanced cancer patients.