After studying physics at university, Dr Dean started training to use radiotherapy and medical imaging in a specialist cancer hospital. This inspired his move into cancer research, where he hoped to help develop even better treatments for patients. Dr Dean has two young children that keep him busy outside of the lab – he says what used to be hiking and music gigs has been replaced with trips to the park and kitchen discos!

Radiotherapy is a gold-standard treatment for glioblastoma, and usually involves daily sessions over the course of several weeks. Interestingly, a recent study showed that mice with glioblastoma survived significantly longer when they were given multiple doses a day, with three hour gaps in between. This method is called ‘oscillatory radiotherapy’.

Dr Jamie Dean and his team aim to study this potentially ground-breaking effect and find out how it helps improve survival. Dr Dean believes it might be like the effect of pushing someone on a swing at the right time – if you can find the right spacing of ‘pushes’, you might have a greater effect on the cells’ internal signals that instruct it to stop growing or die.

The researchers will measure how glioblastoma cells respond differently when treated with normal radiotherapy versus the new oscillatory radiotherapy. Then, they will find out which molecules in the cell are responsible for any change in effect. Dr Dean hopes that this will reveal a new timing method for radiotherapy, how we could use specific drugs to help, and ultimately how to help patients survive glioblastoma for longer.