Dr Jessica Taylor’s ambition is to change the outcome of paediatric brain cancer. She wants children not just to survive but to survive well.

Jessica tells us about her work, her inspiration and her “convoluted” journey from managing a pub to researching a potentially devastating disease.

What’s the aim of your research?

My research in Professor Richard Gilbertson’s lab at the Cancer Research UK (CRUK) Cambridge Institute focuses on a very rare subtype of medulloblastoma. It has a five-year survival rate of about 90% but this cure comes at enormous cost to the child. After aggressive surgery, the child has radiotherapy and chemotherapy, which can cause long-term side effects.

We want to understand why children get these brain tumours in the first place. They’re too young to have been exposed to the environmental factors that contribute to adult cancers. Is paediatric brain cancer all about tiny missteps in development? Could we reverse engineer this pathway and fix it?

If not, can we diagnose earlier and treat using kinder therapies that take into account quality of life as well as survival? That’s something that really appeals to me. Our long-term aim is to either reduce or completely transform the therapeutic journey.

How did you become a cancer researcher?

I had no interest in sciences when I was at school. I wasn’t on that path at all. I wanted to be an actress and I wanted to have fun.

I dropped out of school before A-levels. I’d been working in hospitality since I was 12 or 13 and I carried on. By the time I was 21, I was managing my own pub in Manchester. When I started here in the lab, I already knew how to change a gas canister thanks to my time working in bars!

I had so much curiosity about everything and I wasn’t really fulfilling that in my job, so I applied for a Foundation Year, with the idea that I would end up as an Environmental Health Officer. I’m glad that I waited and was ready for it. I really have had a wonderful time doing every job that I’ve ever done.

How did you manage to change direction?

There were convoluted twists and turns along the way that showed me what I wanted.

After my foundation year, I started a degree in Biochemistry at the University of Salford. I wasn’t sure at first that I could do it – I hadn’t written anything apart from food orders since school! But it was great – I got hooked on chemistry in my first year and was lucky enough to spend my penultimate year at AstraZeneca at such an exciting time when they were working on a drug for ovarian cancer.

Then one day I met a girl on the bus who's boyfriend was doing a Masters at the University of Manchester. The lab he was working in had just advertised a PhD on an adult brain tumour called glioblastoma. I contacted the Professor and was accepted. It nearly gave my old chemistry teacher a heart attack when I told her I was doing a PhD!

And now I’m a researcher at the CRUK Cambridge Institute and a Fellow at Emmanuel College, where I enjoy going to dinner and chatting to people about anything from animal behaviour to 16th-century medieval law.

Who inspires you?

I went to a lecture at the Royal Society by a German virologist called Harald zur Hausen who discovered the role of papilloma viruses in cervical cancer, for which he received the Nobel Prize in 2008. When I met him, I thought it was so cool that he was just hanging around London and chatting to students.

There’s also my Nana. She has shown me that you can push through all kinds of obstacles that might come your way and still live a reasonably fulfilling and interesting life. My nan was diagnosed with her first primary cancer in 1986, the year before I was born. She’s had many since, and she’s still going. In the back of my head I'm thinking “you must keep doing this because otherwise Nana will be mad at you!”

I read about the fantastic work here and I go to amazing seminars, and every day I think my Nana will be proud of me.

When would you say you're most fulfilled in your job?

When I’m in the lab and I feel like I’ve got a plan and the plan might work or it might show something completely different to what I am expecting, and that's cool too. I do some undergraduate teaching and when I finally explain something very complex to someone and they get it, that’s amazingly fulfilling.

What are your hopes for the future of cancer?

However much we would love to be out of a job in cancer research in the next 10 to 50 years, I don’t think it's going to happen. What I do hope is that we can treat people better, with better therapies that do not put people through a battle for life. The family members who’ve had cancer, including my nana and my dad, have all said to me that the chemo and the radiation made them feel worse than the cancer. We don’t want that. We want people to live with cancer for a very long time and have a normal, healthy life.ve with cancer for a very long time and have a normal, healthy life.

Dr Jessica Taylor is a researcher at the Cancer Research UK Cambridge Institute, a member of the Cancer Research UK Cambridge Centre Brain Cancer Virtual Institute, and a Fellow at Emmanuel College.

Published: 15 July 2024

Interview and words: Zoe Smith
Design: Alison Fair
Photography: Nick Saffell
Editor: Louise Walsh

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