The University of Edinburgh seeks to attract the best and brightest PhD students in the Biomedical Sciences, to engage in and assist with the development of collaborative research and teaching programmes with international partner universities.

 Application deadline: 12.00 (midday), Friday 17 June

Three Career Development PhD Scholarships are offered.

These incorporate an innovative programme of research, international experience, training and career development. These scholarships are specifically targeted to the current development of substantial research and teaching links in the area of Biomedical Sciences between the University of Edinburgh and Zhejiang University, China. Each scholarship covers the UK/EU rate of tuition fee as well as a stipend of £14,296 per annum. Subject to satisfactory progress, the scholarships are awarded for 4 years.

This exciting scholarship scheme provides a unique framework for postgraduate research students to undertake research training and development, together with experience of teaching and mentoring in an international context.  We envisage that Career Development Scholars will develop novel skills offering a greater breadth of career choices and opportunities in research, teaching, and international collaboration, development and exchange.

Project: Chemotherapy-Induced Testicular Toxicity

Cancer treatment with chemotherapy drugs is often gonadotoxic, potentially causing life-long infertility. With the continued increase in long-term survival rates, particularly for childhood cancer patients, resulting fertility problems have become of greater concern.

This is particularly a problem for male survivors of childhood cancer, who can be rendered infertile by treatment before they even reach puberty, and for whom there are currently no established fertility preservation methods. While epidemiological studies have allowed many chemotherapy drugs to be grouped into low, moderate or high risk categories for gonadotoxicity, beyond this we know very little about exactly how the drugs damage the gonads, knowledge vital for the informed development of protective strategies.

This project will characterise the testicular cell death triggered in response to commonly-used chemotherapy drugs, to develop a model of the pathways leading to testicular cell death. Work could then investigate potential strategies to protect against this damage. The primary experimental model for the initial work is likely to be tissue culture of immature mouse testis. This technique is currently in use in our laboratories, shown to support prepubertal testis development, at least in the short term (Lopes et al, submitted to Molecular Human Reproduction – manuscript available on request). Further testicular development through to active spermatogenesis could be examined either by extending the culture protocol or using tissue grafting (see e.g. Mitchell et al., 2012, J Clin Endocrinol Metab 97: E341-8. doi: 10.1210/jc.2011-2411). In the later stages of the project, it would be possible to determine whether inhibition of the proteins identified in this first part of the project can have a protective effect on the testis.

This research fits closely into an expanding area of research within Edinburgh Medical School, with the recent formation of Edinburgh Fertility Preservation, a consortium of clinicians and basic scientists working together to optimise fertility for children and young adults with cancer.

Studentship will be based in the Centre for Integrative Physiology.

Primary supervisor

Professor Norah Spears

Second supervisors

Dr Rod Mitchell and co-supervisor Dr Federica Lopes

Contact details

Email: norah.spears@ed.ac.uk

Tel: +44 (0)131 650 3267

Centre for Integrative Physiology website

Centre for Integrative Physiology

Edinburgh Fertility Preservation website

Edinburgh Fertility Preservation