UNIVERSITY of Queensland Pharmacy PhD student, Trinh Hua, has claimed the People's Choice Award in the 2020 Virtual UQ three-minute thesis (3MT) Competition.
In her three-minute video, Hua outlined her PhD research into cancer treatments, comparing cancer cells that survive radiotherapy or chemotherapy to zombies.
"These cancer cells that can come back to life... can also replicate much faster [than normal cancer cells]," she said.
"Therefore one cancer zombie can rapidly grow into an army.
"These cancer zombies are also better at spreading all over the body, similar to how zombies are very good at spreading all over the world during an apocalypse."
Hau noted that unlike the un-dead, cancer zombies look like any other cancer cell, making it difficult to identify cells that can bounce back to life after treatment.
However, she noted that during her research she had developed a solution to detecting the un-dead cells, using red and green dyes in combination with robotic screening tools, enabling her to distinguish a single zombie cancer from thousands of cells.
"This is a tool which drug companies can now use to find these cancer zombies in order to design drugs that can target this new breed of cancer," she said.
"Because as shown by many apocolyptic movies, 'to defeat your enemy, you must know your enemy'."
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