18 July 2024
Dr Zoi Diamantopoulou has been awarded a UKRI Future Leaders Fellowship (FLF), a scheme which provides long-term support to enable fellows to tackle new or emerging research. Zoi will use her FLF programme to investigate how the circadian rhythm controls the spread of cancer – metastasis.
Zoi Diamantopoulou is a cancer biologist specialising in understanding metastasis (cancer spread). She completed her PhD in Cancer Biology at the University of Patras in Greece and pursued postdoctoral fellowships at the CRUK Manchester Institute and ETH Zurich, enriching her expertise in metastasis.
Zoi said: “I am delighted to receive a UKRI Future Leaders Fellowship (FLF). This will allow me to return to the UK and establish my own independent research group at the CRUK Scotland Institute, affiliated with the School of Cancer Sciences at the University of Glasgow. The globally renowned expertise of the CRUK Scotland Institute in studying metastasis using preclinical mouse models, combined with the academic clinicians at the University of Glasgow provides the ideal environment for me and my team to develop this innovative programme and address the big challenge of metastasis.”
The goal of Zoi’s FLF programme is to investigate how time of day controls metastasis. Metastasis, the spread of cancer cells to other parts of the body, is the main reason for cancer-related deaths and presents a challenge to cancer treatment due to the absence of effective anti-metastatic therapies. Zoi has recently discovered that metastasis is regulated by the circadian rhythm, an internal clock that our body has developed to synchronise and adjust its functions to the daily changes in the environment. She found that circulating tumour cells (CTCs) – cancer cells that escape from the tumour, which enter the blood circulation, travel through the body and form new tumours in different organs – are generated and spread predominantly during sleep. Building on these findings, Zoi plans to use the knowledge of how time of day controls metastasis across various cancers to develop time-defined approaches for detecting and treating metastatic cancers. Read more about Zoi's work here.
