Email: claire.lewis@sheffield.ac.uk

Research profile and key clinical specialties

Clare currently holds a Personal Chair in Molecular & Cellular Pathology and heads a team of pre- and postdoctoral scientists in the Academic Unit of Inflammation and Tumour Targeting. Her research is focused mainly on the role of white blood cells called macrophages in both tumour progression and tumour responses to conventional anti-cancer treatments like chemotherapy and irradiation.

Her team have also developed novel ways of using these cells to target large amounts of therapeutic virus specifically to prostate tumours. This work has been reported in the UK national press (The BBC, The Guardian, The Daily Mail).

Claire also works collaboratively to exploit a novel zebrafish model to investigate the role of macrophages in angiogenesis, tumour progression and response to therapy. Her group is currently funded by grants from the EU, Cancer Research UK, Yorkshire Cancer Research and the Breast Cancer Now.

She is a member of the editorial board of several journals, including Blood, the Journal of Clinical Investigation and the International Journal of Cancer.

After completing her DPhil (PhD) in Oxford in 1986, Claire held two postdoctoral positions and a Research Lectureship in the Medical School there before joining the University of Sheffield Medical School in 1996.

Two key publications

• Muthana M, Kennerley AJ, Richardson J, Paul M, Murdoch C, Lunj S, Hughes R, Farrow N, Dobson J, Pankhurst Q, Lythgoe M, Wild J and Lewis CE. (2015). Directing cell therapy to anatomic target sites in vivo with magnetic resonance targeting. Nature Communs. 6: 8009 (full article published online Aug 18th).
• Hughes R Qian B-Z, Muthana M, Keklikoglou I, Olson OC, Tazzyman S, Danson S, Addison C, Clemons M, Gonzalez-Angulo AM, Joyce JA, De Palma M, Pollard J and Lewis CE. (2015). Perivascular M2 Macrophages Stimulate Tumor Relapse after Chemotherapy. Cancer Res. 75: 3479-91

Possible PhD projects

• Role of perivascular tumour macrophages in limiting the efficacy of immunotherapy in breast cancer patients.

More information

Previously supervised 24 PhD students, including a number of clinical research fellows (with 100% success rate).

Keywords: Tumours, macrophages, inflammation, tumour, cancer, molecular, cellular, Claire, Lewis, Sheffield

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