Opportunities for postdoctoral clinical fellows at the ICR
The Emerging Clinical Academic Fellowship scheme, newly launched by CRIS Cancer Foundation and the ICR, offers 2-3 year fellowships to support the development of early postdoctoral-stage clinical researchers.
The programme will help to prepare outstanding clinical researchers to apply for group leader positions – either as a clinician scientist or career development faculty.
Applications are now open and will close on the 31st May.
The fellow will be hosted in an existing ICR group, see listed below. The scheme is open to all clinical specialities and research projects. A maximum of one fellow will be appointed per year.
Our aim is to grow our pool of clinical group leaders, who are vital to the delivery of the ICR and Royal Marsden research strategy. We particularly encourage projects in molecular pathology, tissue pathology, digital pathology and clinical data science.
Eligibility
Prospective fellows will be expected to:
- Hold a research degree PhD/MDRes
- Hold a medical (or related) clinical degree
- Hold a GMC registration (or equivalent national registration)
- Be close to achieving CCT or to have recently obtained it.
The successful candidate should be in a position to commence their fellowship within six months of the award offer.
The post will be expected to have a research/clinical split of between 80/20 to 60/40.
Salaries will be paid up to but not including NHS consultant level (up to and including ST8 stage of NHS training). Relevant pay premiums and London weighting should also be included. A consumables allowance of £15k per year per fellow will be provided.
How to apply
- Interested applicants should contact the research group leader/s they would like to work with to discuss their proposed research
- Applicants should then complete the application form and equality monitoring form and include a supporting statement from their proposed host (group leader)
- Email their application form to [email protected] by 31st May with interviews for shortlisted applicants to follow in July
Please note that successful candidates will also be asked to submit a proof of approval of Less Than Full-Time (LTFT) training from NHS England together with a supporting letter from their Training Programme Director.
Clinical fellows who already have their own salary funding through other sources are welcome to apply to be hosted within an ICR research group at any time during the year. Please contact the group leaders of interest directly.
ICR groups interested in hosting a clinical fellow
The following ICR group leaders have expressed an interest in hosting a postdoctoral clinical fellow through the new CRIS-ICR scheme. You are welcome to contact others not listed.
Alejandra Bruna
We are interested in understanding the primary causes of disease-related deaths in children, specifically how solid paediatric cancer cells tolerate treatment, regain growth, and evolve, particularly in non-genetic contexts. We hypothesise that plasticity—the ability of a single cell to alter phenotypes without changes to the DNA in response to environmental factors—plays a vital role in these cancer evolutionary processes, including treatment resistance.
To investigate this, we combine classical experimental evolution with single-cell tools that provide temporal resolution. By utilizing integrated expressible DNA barcodes along with a newly developed molecular recorder, we can monitor the clonal and phenotypic evolution of childhood cancer cells during the drug response process. This approach integrates multi-omics, live microscopy, and mathematical modelling, allowing us to define the evolutionary principles governing these cancers and identify novel biomarkers and drivers of non-genetic adaptation.
Maggie Cheang
We invite applications from clinicians in training for a postdoctoral fellowship focused on treatment-resistant and re-lapsed breast cancers. The project will leverage data from major clinical trials, including ICR-CTSU-led studies such as POETIC, PALLET, POETIC-A, ongoing prospective trials, and external cohorts from the US-based ALLIANCE and Spanish SOLTI groups. The research will integrate bulk and spatial omics with cutting-edge AI/machine learning methodologies to investigate tumour-intrinsic and acquired therapeutic resistance.
The fellow will receive interdisciplinary training in digital and molecular pathology, AI-driven biomarker discovery, integrative multi-omics analysis, and statistical modelling. A key component includes designing and preparing protocols for biomarker-driven clinical trials. There will be opportunities for national exposure and international collaboration, including site visits to trial groups in Spain and the US.
This opportunity is ideal for clinician-scientists interested in molecular oncology, AI, and data science in clinical trials, particularly those aiming to develop as clinical investigators or translational leads. Prior computational experience is beneficial but not essential.
Céire Costello
Drug/drug interactions (DDIs) are associated with an increased risk of adverse oncological treatment outcomes, severe toxicities, early treatment discontinuation, but also with hospitalisation, mortality, physical and functional decline, and, in some case, reduced antitumor effects. DDIs are difficult to identify in cancer patients because they often take a large number of medications for both their cancer treatment and co-occurring medical conditions (polypharmacy), making it challenging to track potential interactions between all the drugs, especially when considering factors like age, genetics, and fluctuating organ function that can further complicate the picture. This can lead to underestimation of potential adverse effects and missed opportunities for optimisation of medication regimen. Lack of integrated care can further exacerbate the problem of drug interactions, and lead to poor patient outcomes. In order to identify and manage drug interactions in cancer care a comprehensive medication review is crucial. However, this is time consuming for busy clinical teams and is often not carried out thoroughly or regularly.
AI-driven models can help explore and predict DDIs in oncology patients. Large language models (LLMs) can be used to identify DDIs and can assist in oncology treatment in the following ways: knowledge mobilisation, personalised predictions and real-time clinical decision support. Using existing real-world healthcare datasets this project will utilise novel data science methodologies to produce personalised predictions and clinical decision support for DDI identification and management.
Magnus Dillon
Rectal, pancreatic and oesophageal adenocarcinomas rarely respond completely to radiotherapy, and have poor responses to conventional immunotherapies. Radiation is well known to modulate the tumour immune microenvironment, but, as yet, combination therapies have not yielded impressive results.
We are using translational clinical samples to look for novel immune and microenvironment targets which could be used in combination with radiotherapy. These include fixed longitudinal biopsies from rectal, oesophageal cancers and fresh tissue samples from rectal and pancreatic cancers. We are building cohorts of radiation-treated pancreatic cancer specimens.
We use in vivo models to test novel radiation technologies (FLASH and microbeam) in colorectal and pancreatic cancer models and are developing ex vivo techniques from these mouse models which could be used for immune-radiation assays in patient samples in the future.
We aim to identify promising immune-focused treatment strategies, which will be translated into early phase drug-radiotherapy clinical studies at The Royal Marsden.
Emma Hall
We invite applications for a research fellowship focused on exploratory analyses of toxicity outcomes from our internationally practice changing series of prostate radiotherapy trials. Our most recently reported trial, PACE-B (NEJM 2024), demonstrated that 5 fraction radiotherapy was non-inferior to 20 fraction treatment in terms of cancer control but was associated with a higher medium-term risk of genitourinary side effects. The fellowship will utilise clinician and patient reported toxicity outcomes and radiotherapy planning data across a number of trials to further explore this association. We are particularly interested in better ways to quantify and report meaningful toxicity differences be that maximal toxicity, changes over time or measures of “burden” and in identifying baseline/dosimetric predictors of toxicity to support personalised decision making, strategies for toxicity reduction and/or follow-up protocols and future clinical trial design.
This is an excellent opportunity for clinicians interested in radiation oncology and clinical trials research.
Paul Huang
The Sarcoma Accelerator Programme is an ambitious effort to utilise data-driven approaches to identify curative treatments in high-risk soft tissue sarcoma patients. As part of this international multi-institutional programme, we are collecting clinical, radiological, digital and molecular pathology as well as molecular profiling data from over 1000 sarcoma patients. Depending on the interests of the fellow, the project will utilise these multi-modal datasets to 1. Develop and implement next-generation integrative nomograms for patient risk stratification, 2. Utilise machine learning to define improved digital pathology and/or radiomic measures of neoadjuvant treatment response, or 3. Integrate high-dimensional spatial Omics data with tissue pathology to dissect intratumoural heterogeneity with respect to immune features and therapy response. The clinical fellow will be embedded in a multi-disciplinary translational sarcoma research team at the ICR and benefit from close and regular interactions with the world-leading Sarcoma Unit at the Royal Marsden.
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Robert Huddart
We invite applications from clinicians in training for a research fellowship focused on biomarker discovery in muscle-invasive bladder cancer. This project will leverage data from prospective bladder trials including RAIDER trial (Huddart et al. European Urology 2025), BC2001 and local data sets. Despite recent advances in systemic therapies validated prognostic and predictive biomarkers remain limited. Bladder preservation has become an international priority, with a critical need for improved risk stratification tools to guide personalised treatment.
This project utilises the well-characterised RAIDER trial cohort to investigate biological and morphological features using advanced omics. digital and molecular pathology. The goal is to identify biomarkers predictive of survival and radiotherapy response, ultimately informing future trial design and personalised care.
The fellow will receive training in biomarker discovery, molecular pathology, trial design, and biostatistics. This is an excellent opportunity for clinician-scientists interested in the intersection of radiation oncology, pathology, clinical trials, and translational research.
Alan Melcher
Soft tissue sarcomas (STS) are an aggressive cancer group with high unmet need for effective novel therapeutic agents. Although immunotherapy has revolutionised the treatment of other cancer types, efficacy of immunotherapy has been limited in STS. We are looking for a clinical researcher at an early-postdoctoral stage to work on the following projects over 2-3 years to provide a better understanding of the immunology of STS and develop new therapies.
- To work on the translational science of an open-label, single-center, single-arm phase 2 study of RP2 virus in combination with PD1 blockade in patients with locally advanced, recurrent and/or metastatic STS which will start recruitment at RMH. Patients will have research biopsies and blood samples collected as part of the study for biomarker analysis.
- To understand the immune landscape of angiosarcomas. There is evidence that immunotherapy is effective in some angiosarcoma patients. The Sarcoma Unit at the Royal Marsden treats a large number of patients with angiosarcoma, and many are treated with compassionate access checkpoint inhibitors. This project will involve mapping the immune landscape in treatment naïve angiosarcoma resection samples as well in patients post checkpoint inhibitor treatment.
Rachael Natrajan
Our group aims to understand the subclonal heterogeneity in therapy resistance and metastatic spread in breast cancer. We focus on the role of epigenetic plasticity and how cancer cells modulate their epigenome to evolve therapy resistance and their interplay with the microenvironment with a particular emphasis on triple negative and lobular breast cancers.
To pursue these goals, we use range of state-of-the-art molecular pathology techniques including, multimodal single cell sequencing and single cell spatial primary profiling of longitudinal patient samples and matched metastatic samples, and concurrent liquid biopsies. These are linked with in vitro and in vivo models of patient derived organoids and xenografts and genetically engineered in vivo models linked in with digital pathology analyses to understand the molecular evolution of the disease.
Clinicians who are interested in the subclonal evolution of therapy resistant breast cancer and in developing novel stratification biomarkers for breast cancer patients are welcome to discuss ideas and potential projects.
Ben O'Leary
Our group studies how cancer evolves and how this impacts response to therapies used in the clinic, with a particular focus on head and neck cancer, radiotherapy, and immunotherapy.
We use multi-omic approaches with a combination of pre-clinical models and unique cohorts of clinical samples collected from patients receiving treatment to explore the interaction between the genome and the tumour microenvironment.
Ultimately, we aim to understand the reasons why treatments fail and use this to develop personalised treatment strategies and novel approaches to address treatment resistance.
We are currently working on how the evolution of genome instability mediates immune evasion in virally and non-virally driven head and neck cancers, using both pre-clinical functional approaches and bioinformatics.
Victoria Sanz-Moreno
We study how Rho GTPase signalling and cytoskeletal remodelling control metastatic disease. We are interested in understanding how cancer cells sense extracellular signals via their cytoskeleton and integrate the responses altering gene transcription to promote metastasis. We study the molecular cues that aid in tumour metastatic dissemination via the crosstalk between the cytoskeleton and the nucleus. Moreover, whether metastatic cells develop an (epigenetic) memory is a matter of active investigation in the lab. We have a particular focus on Rho-kinase (ROCK) and Myosin II, as a crucial axis for the regulation of many processes in metastatic cancer cells.
How cancer cells interact with the tumour microenvironment is crucial for tumour progression and dissemination. We also study how the cytoskeleton in cancer cells affects cancer cell-normal cell communication. Using co-cultures, 3-Dimensional matrix imaging systems, mouse models and patient tissue samples, we study interactions between cancer cells and the extracellular matrix and stromal and/or immune cells. We aim to understand if these interactions will be aided by signals sensed by the cytoskeleton of cancer cells and transmitted to transcription factors and/or chromatin. This is very important as cancer cells are addicted to transcriptional rewiring. The ultimate goal is to develop anti-metastasis therapies.
Christina Yap
Treatment tolerability in cancer is critical for ensuring patients can stay on therapy, maintain quality of life, and achieve the best possible outcomes. Poor tolerability can lead to dose reductions, treatment delays, or discontinuation, ultimately compromising effectiveness and patient well-being. Traditionally, tolerability is assessed through clinician-reported adverse events (AEs), primarily focusing on severe events or those requiring treatment modifications. However, this approach often overlooks the patient’s lived experience, especially lower-grade toxicities that can significantly affect daily life and long-term well-being. Patient-Reported Outcomes (PROs) provide a crucial perspective by capturing symptoms and functional impairments that clinicians may underreport.
Integrating PROs into tolerability assessments could refine how treatment side effects are measured, enabling more patient-centred decision-making and trial design. This fellowship, in collaboration with leading international multidisciplinary experts, will systematically evaluate the role of PROs in assessing treatment tolerability, with the potential to transform cancer therapy evaluation and improve patient care