Dr Jessica Taylor

Jessica is one of our Bye–Fellows, elected in 2025. She supervises undergraduate students who take the Medicine Tripos, and is a Senior Research Associate at CRUK. She was previously our Roger Ekins Fellow and part of Emmanuel's Research Fellowship.

Biography

Jessica's academic career could be described as 'rather convoluted'; she began her working life in hospitality, after dropping out of Sixth Form (Drama and Classics A–levels unfortunately couldn’t pay the bills!). She began managing her own pub in Manchester during her 20s, then deciding to start at university. The access course at the University of Manchester was suggested to be too academically rigorous for someone with Jessica's CV, however she was welcomed with open arms at the University of Salford, where she studied Biological Sciences. After getting hooked on Biochemistry in first year, Jessica was lucky enough to spend her penultimate year at AstraZeneca, where she found a passion for automation and translation oncology. She moved to the University of Manchester to study for her PhD on Glioblastoma, an incurable adult brain tumour, after meeting someone on the bus in final year who knew a Professor who was after someone with Jessica's academic skills. After three years of adult brain tumour research, she reached out to Professor Richard Gilbertson at CRUK Cambridge Institute to continue her academic career in paediatric brain tumour research (perhaps because she just wasn’t depressing people enough at parties!).

Away from the lab, she engaged in teaching, both as an undergraduate supervisor and, more practically, in the lab with her graduate students, or paddleboarding down the Cam on the weekend with her dog.

Research

Jessica's current research focuses on Medulloblastoma, the most common malignant brain tumour in children. Detailed analyses of gene expression patterns in these tumours, coupled with studies of their response to treatment, has revealed four main disease subgroups. She studies one of these subgroups, known as WNT–activated medulloblastoma and how it can be diagnosed in a less invasive way and treat it in a way that is less harmful to the patient than the current standard of-care. WNT-medulloblastoma has a 5–year survival rate of ~90%; however, this cure comes at enormous cost to the child. The aggressive surgery, radiotherapy, and chemotherapy can cause long–term side effects that can devastate each survivor’s quality of life.

Jessica's research during her time at Emmanuel is focused on designing novel tumour–specific probes which will allow treatment for these children in a less harmful way, diagnosing these tumours non-invasively. To design these probes, her lab aims to get an idea of the most plentiful receptors, or targets, on the surface of the tumour compared to normal cells. To do this, she is using a method of mapping the surface proteins on tumour cells, allowing Jessica and her students to design labelled antibodies that bind to these cancer–specific receptors and avoid healthy ones.