Dr Evangeline Jackson is an early career researcher, awarded her PhD in Medical Biochemistry by publication in December 2023. This work focused on molecular mechanisms underpinning the uniformly fatal paediatric brain cancer, ‘diffuse intrinsic pontine glioma’ or ‘DIPG’.

Dr Jackson is a specialist in DIPG in vitro modelling and biochemical analysis, working as part of the Cancer Signalling Research Group (CSRG), led by Professor Matthew Dun since 2018, based at the University of Newcastle and Hunter Medical Research Institute. DIPG is a highly aggressive cancer, with palliative radiotherapy the only treatment available which has some survival extension and symptom relief.
Dr Jackson’s research focuses on harnessing cellular and molecular biology techniques, coupled with high-resolution quantitative proteomics to find new treatments for DIPG. This research utilises patient-derived cell lines in vitro as well as their establishment in vivo to effectively model patient disease, necessary for translation to the clinical setting.

Dr Jackson has highlighted the utility of systems-wide biology approaches through her recent research investigating a therapy which disrupts the energy metabolism of DIPG cancer cells by disrupting normal mitochondrial dysfunction, known as ONC201. However, DIPG cells are able to evade cell death by upregulating compensatory growth and survival pathways, driven by the kinase ‘PI3K’, revealing a new combination treatment target. Therefore, the combination of ONC201 and the PI3K inhibitor, paxalisib, has shown preclinical promise, assisting in the development of the international clinical trial, PNOC022. Dr Jackson continues to expand this research by applying these analytical techniques to other therapies, in order to find clinically-relevant, novel combinations to be used for the treatment of DIPG.