Using mouse models to answer mechanistic and cancer therapeutic questions

Biography of the speaker

Dr. Nathiya Muthalagu obtained her Bachelor’s degree from Madurai Kamaraj University in 2007 and went on to pursue a Masters from The University of Madras. She commenced her PhD under the guidance of Prof. Daniel Murphy at the University Wurzburg, Germany before transferring to University of Glasgow-UK to complete her studies in 2015. Later, she worked at the Beatson Institute for cancer research as a Postdoctoral Fellow until Feb 2020, before joining IIT Madras as a faculty. As a PhD student and a Postdoctoral fellow, Dr. Nathiya utilised various genetically engineered mouse models (GEMM) and cell culture models, and characterized a new metastatic mouse model for pancreatic cancer driven by the oncogenes MYC and KRAS. The overarching goal of Dr. Nathiya’s research is to understand, at the molecular and cellular level how oncogenes control neuroendocrine plasticity, how this contributes to metastasis and how we can target this to improve the clinical outcome of patients.