Profile

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Alena Pance

My CV

  • Education:

    I am originally from Prague, the capital of Bohemia, better known as the Czech Republic, but I grew up in Venezuela, where I did most of my studies. I graduated in biology and then did an MSc in Cell Biology at the Universidad Simon Bolivar in Caracas.
    I won a prize for academic achievement which, together with a British Council scholarship allowed me to come to Cambridge to do my PhD in neurobiology… Cambridge UK that is.

  • Qualifications:

    I didn’t do my studies in the UK and I’m not sure what the correspondence would be. So let’s say that I was an average student in secondary school overall and a bit better at the subjects I liked. My first degree was slightly better than average and my masters won me a scholarship for academic achievement.

  • Work History:

    After my PhD, I went to France to work as a research associate in the INSERM at the University of Burgundy, where I worked on transcriptional regulation in cancer.
    Then I got a Marie Curie fellowship from the European Research Council to come back to Cambridge and combine my transcriptional regulation studies with neurobiology.
    But it’s not just about work and I’ve continued playing the piano, doing courses here and there and in France had great fun joining the school of jazz to learn to sing.

  • Current Job:

    I am a Senior Staff Scientist at the Wellcome Sanger Institute. The institute is part of the Genome Campus, located in Hinxton, South Cambridgeshire.

    • About Me:

      I am a cell biologist and a musician and have equal passion for both, I wonder if I’ll manage to combine the two one day…

    • Read more

      This year, I joined the Public Engagement team at the Sanger Institute and I am taking care of the exchange and communication around some of the big projects. One is about cancer, trying to classify the mutations present in particular cancers and establish genetic ‘signatures’ of them. The other is about identifying the different cell types in the body and understand their function.

      My direct research is using stem cells to study malaria. Though the life cycle of malaria parasites is quite complex, the main stage that causes disease is when the parasite infects red blood cells. At the moment, we have found out a wealth of biological information about the parasite because it has been extensively sequenced so we know what the genes are and when they are expressed… even if we don’t yet know excatly what they do. But the host cell is a total mystery mainly because mammalian red blood cells don’t have a nucleus so it is not possible to sequence them nor to manipulate them genetically, both of which are key to understand how these cells interact with the parasite. So we use stem cells that do have a nucleus and therefore can be manipulated and they are also pluripotent so they can be differentiated into any cell type, including red blood cells.

      This work also gives me a chance to continue studying my favourite cellular process: transcription. This is the process by which genes are translated into the effectors of the cell: the proteins. The regulation of this process is the basis for everything: how cells develop, grow, proliferate and change. How they interact with each other and with the environment and how they respond to challenges such as drugs or parasites.

    • My Typical Day:

      My typical day now, is probably very similar to anyone else’s. I spend most of it at my computer writing articles to make public the research we have done and having virtual meetings to keep things going. I find it quite hard to be sitting down for so long, as I normally run around the lab and constantly go from office to lab to meetings. I’m grateful to my little dog, who always comes round to remind me that it is time for a walk, and he won’t take no for an answer.

    • Read more

      My typical day used to be like this:

      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pIHqaCm7xZo

      but nowadays it is more like this:

    • What I'd do with the prize money:

      I would use it to design a hands-on activity to explain how cells work to people.

    • My latest work:

      My main work centres around malaria. I am mostly interested in the interaction between malaria parasites and their mammalian hosts and because the infectious cycle of the parasite in the blood is the stage most associated with clinical disease, this is the part of the life cycle I study.

      In this age of genetics, we have access to great data about the parasites, but assessing the host is a bit more difficult. This is because the malaria parasites invade red blood cells and as these do not have a nucleus, we don’t have the ‘genetic handle’ to understand and manipulate them. So, my solution is to use stem cells. The way this works is that we either reprogramme induced plutipotent stem cells or IPS from patients or we use some of the already established lines. As these cells have the potential to become almost any cell type, we developed a protocol to turn them into red blood cells, which we then expose to the parasite to see if they can infect.

      This allows us to modify some of the proteins normally present in the red blood cell and see whether the parasite still infects them. In this way, we found one of the major receptors for the rodent malaria parasite Plasmodium berghei… yes, mice as well as many other animals suffer from malaria too.

      We have also identified some of the major components of human red blood cells that are necessary for the parasite to infect people.