Xiaoyu Sherry Yin 29th Lorne Cancer Conference 2017

Xiaoyu Sherry Yin

Xiaoyu Yin started at the University of Melbourne in 2013 as a Bachelor of Biomedicine Chancellor’s Scholar with an International Undergraduate Scholarship. She graduated in 2015 with a major in pharmacology, and is currently a first-year Doctor of Medicine student at the Melbourne Medical School. She was a two-time summer student and also an Undergraduate Research Opportunity Program (UROP) student in the Molecular Radiation Laboratory at the Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre under the supervision of A/Prof Olga Martin. During her time in the laboratory, she worked on the development of an Epithelial Immunospot (EPISPOT) assay used for the enumeration of viable Circulating Tumour Cells (CTC) after radiotherapy and analysed DNA repair kinetics of sarcoma patients from the International Sarcoma Kindred Study (ISKS), non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) radiotherapy patients from the Galli-PET study and former paediatric cancer radiotherapy patients who developed secondary cancers. She also co-authored with Martin et al. an invited review paper for Seminars in Cancer Biology (Impact Factor 9.14 in 2014) titled “Potential strategies to ameliorate radiotherapy-induced second malignant neoplasms”, which has been tentatively accepted and subjected to review. She was awarded Cancer Therapeutics CRC Summer Research Scholarship in 2014 and Cancer Council Victoria Cancer Research Vacation Studentship in 2015. This is her first time at the Lorne Cancer Conference, where she will present a functional approach for quantifying DNA damage and repair responses in sarcoma patients and subsequently determining their genetic susceptibility to cancer risk. This work was accomplished in collaboration with Prof David Thomas, the Director of the Kinghorn Cancer Centre and the Head of the Cancer Division of the Garvan Institute whose research interests lie in cancer genomics and sarcomas. Xiaoyu has also presented this study at the 5th Australia-China Biomedical Research Conference, Oct 30th – Nov 1st, 2015.