People fixing the world: Dr Fiona Benson

Dr Fiona Benson

How long have you been in Lancaster University?

I started at Lancaster University in 2000. So 23 years

Where were you before?

So immediately before that, I was at the Imperial Cancer Research Fund (ICRF) Laboratories at Clare Hall in North London. The Imperial Cancer Research Fund merged with the Cancer Research Campaign and is now CRUK. I worked there for ten years before coming to Lancaster as a Lecturer in Cancer Biology. There are significant differences between working in a Research Institute versus a university, chief among those being the students!

You made significant discoveries during that part of your career. Can you tell us about them?

My research has never been at the translational edge of cancer biology. All my research, from my PhD through my work for the ICRF and subsequently, has all been about the fundamental understanding of how the integrity of DNA is maintained.

I teach about how DNA is repaired and the proteins involved in that repair. I teach about how proteins repair DNA and then once our students understand the mechanisms, I go back and tell them which proteins do what. It's at that point where I can say, 'and the protein that does this bit of DNA repair, I was the first person to discover and purify it, and characterise it'. It piques their interest!

That research, and research on related proteins that I was involved in first characterising, have been fundamental in certain breast cancer research.

I was studying DNA repair and that led to explorations of new treatments for cancer. There is a particular link between the proteins that I first characterised in breast cancer, which has led to new targeted treatments for some subtypes of breast cancer.

Do you see the future being a better place because of some of his work?

I do! We take it for granted now, and students will use it regularly in the labs, but the big development for me was actually PCR (Polymerase Chain Reaction) DNA sequencing. The development of this basic ability to generate a specific piece of DNA once you knew something about the sequence, opened up my field. It was more revolutionary than CRISPR CAS-9. PCR opened up our understanding of how things work on a molecular level.

So one of the proteins that we've expressed in the lab, and purify is a protein called Alpha-synuclein which is implicated in Parkinson's disease. We can purify that protein and we can look at how it behaves in a test tube to then extrapolate how it behaves in human brains when things go wrong. And then that allows you to think about ways that you could block the things that go wrong in humans brains. Our research on things like this is always looking at improvements to health.

Cast your mind into the future. What would the next amazing breakthrough look like for you?

There are a lot of seemingly very different diseases that have proteins that misbehave in the same way. Examples of that are Alzheimer's disease, Parkinson's disease, motor neurone disease, and some of the circulatory disorders as well. And they are all a result of proteins that don't fold properly. And I think for me, in terms of a biomedical approach would be something that allows us to manipulate these proteins so that they don't misbehave, and misfold and disaggregate. How can we block these proteins from sticking together? Getting to grips with these diseases would be amazing, and we have PhD students working towards that now.

What makes you most proud of our graduates?

My pathway here in Lancaster has taken more of a teaching focus, and the thing that I am most proud of is the number of our graduates working in the NHS in the pathology labs. I can go into any path lab in the northwest and further afield, and I can see our graduates.

And what I would also say is that from the maths and the science and the written skills that are developed throughout these Bioscience degrees, our students are incredibly well-prepared to take their skills into any number of fields.

Dr Fiona Benson standing in front of a fume cupboard.
Dr Fiona Benson

What I love is I can go into any path lab in the Northwest, and I can see our graduates.

A quote from Dr Fiona Benson Biomedical and Life Sciences