Front Quad of Lincoln College, the walls covered in bright green ivy

Dr Eileen Parkes

Dr Eileen Parkes

  • George and Susan Brownlee Junior Research Fellow in the Biomedical Sciences
  • Clinical Research Career Development Fellow

Profile

Originally from Northern Ireland, I completed my medical training in Belfast. I was awarded my PhD from the Kennedy lab in Belfast, where I worked with an industry-academic partnership. At this time I discovered constitutive innate immune signalling in DNA repair deficient cancers, a finding on which my career has been built. I joined Oxford in 2019, and work as a medical oncology consultant in early phase trials, as well as in the Centre for Immuno-Oncology and Department of Oncology.

Research

In my lab work, we focus on modelling tumour cell-stromal-immune interactions and translating our findings for clinical benefit. My research has focused on the cGAS-STING innate immune pathway in cancers - a pathway which is counterintuitively activated in chromosomally unstable cancers. My lab works to solve this conundrum and understand the benefits of cGAS-STING signalling to the cancer and how best to target this for future clinical application.