Talking proteomics at BSPR 2022

Posted on: 19 July 2022 by Megan Ford in July 2022 Posts

BSPR conference ID badge

Megan Ford is a PhD student in the Department of Pharmacology and Therapeutics. She recently attended the annual British Society for Proteome Research conference in Oxford and told us all about her research and the trip.

My research

After finishing my undergraduate studies in 2020, I joined Professor Dean Naisbitt and Dr Xiaoli Meng looking into the causes of adverse drug reactions. Specifically, at T-cell activation, including protein-antigens generated by a particular drug and the potential mechanisms of presentation. The drug I look at was removed from clinical trials due to drug-induced liver injury and we are now investigating the specific mediation of these reactions. Previous work has been done using patient samples to show drug-specific T-cell clones can be generated using their peripheral blood mononuclear cells (PBMCs) and the drug/metabolite. This is now being repeated using genotyped healthy donor PBMC with HLA-alleles of interest and further proteomics investigations.

 Megan Ford delivering her talk

BSPR 2022

I recently attended BSPR 2022 for three days in Oxford. The conference was titled ‘Next generation proteomics’. Here I presented a poster on my proteomics work and gave a 1-minute flask talk to encourage the audience to engage with me at my poster. I enjoyed the opportunity to present even for a short period of time. Over the three days I connected with many people including different PIs, students, industry collaborators and the BSPR committee. It was also great to listen to all of the talks including those from students from different groups and fields of proteomics.

 

I was very grateful to have been able to attend this conference thanks to ISMIB and BSPR. It was fun to be able to connect with so many different researchers (I even got a question right at the quiz!). I briefly visited the botanical gardens for my second love besides proteomics- plants. I look forward to attending next year in collaboration with EuPA in Newcastle, where I hope to give a short talk.