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Optimising drug scheduling for combination therapies against cancer.

Description 
Frequent resistance to single-agent treatment means that doctors are turning to combination therapy, i.e. ‘cocktails of drugs’, to beat resistance. We found that the exact timing and order that drugs are combined can have a huge effect on their ability to kill cancer cells. This project aims to explore various scheduling strategies for drug combinations, with the goal to maximize treatment benefit by: enhancing efficacy while reducing toxicity. This project will use a variety of techniques, including cell signalling and biological assays, si/shRNA knockdown, CrispR/Cas9 gene editing, use of small molecule drugs, etc., to characterize the dynamic response of targeted anti-cancer drugs and their combination in cancer cells.
Essential criteria: 
Minimum entry requirements can be found here: https://www.monash.edu/admissions/entry-requirements/minimum
Keywords 
targeted therapy, cancer, drug scheduling, sequential treatment, combination therapy, drug resistance, cancer signalling
School 
Biomedicine Discovery Institute (School of Biomedical Sciences) » Biochemistry and Molecular Biology
Available options 
PhD/Doctorate
Masters by research
Honours
Joint PhD/Exchange Program
Time commitment 
Full-time
Top-up scholarship funding available 
No
Physical location 
Clayton Campus

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