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Your body needs oxygen. Oxygen is taken to every part of your body by red blood cells in tubes called blood vessels. Most of the big blood vessels in your body will have formed before you were born, but smaller ones can grow when you’re an adult. I am interested in how these smaller vessels grow and whether I can control how they grow.

The reason I’m so interested in blood vessels is that they are very important in cancer. Cancer cells can be much greedier and faster growing than the rest of the cells of the body. They need lots of oxygen and to get this they need blood vessels to deliver the blood to them. We now think that cancer cells encourage vessels to grow and create their own network of vessels. They then use these vessels to get enough oxygen and also, sometimes, as a way of spreading around the body.

I am trying to find ways to stop the cancers from controlling blood vessels so that we can starve the cancers and also stop them from spreading. To look at the blood vessels, our lab has found a way to grow them in dishes. We can look at how the vessels branch and grow and even look at which genes they might need to grow. We can turn genes on or off and see what happens to blood vessels. I use microscopes to look at the vessels and fluorescent paints (antibodies) to investigate the cells in lots of detail.

I also look at cancer tumours taken from patients to see how the blood vessels grow in and around cancer cells.

My day normally starts with catching up on my emails – a lot of my experiments involve working with many different people so I send a lot of emails and get everything organised. I then go and get a cup of tea, as it helps to get my brain going (also, I love talking to my colleagues about last nights TV!). Then its into the laboratory. I spend a lot of time looking after my cells – they’re almost like pets. You have to feed them and tend to them and we have to be especially careful to keep them sterile. This means we have to use a special, sterile box whenever we do anything to them.

When I’m not working on my cells, I might be doing experiments at my laboratory bench. I am a molecular biologist, which means that most of my experiments involve moving very small amounts of liquid around (one thousandth of a millilitre!). We have special instruments (pipettes) to do this. I might set up an experiment to make lots of copies a piece of DNA so that I can look at it in more detail, or I might take some of my cells and stain them using fluorescent labels so that I can look at them under the microscope.

On days when I am using the microscope, I might be sitting in a dark room for about 6 hours. This is because we can only see our fluorescent labels in the dark. I make 3D images of cells and blood vessels, which is pretty fun, so sitting in the dark doesn’t seem so bad!

At the end of day, I’ll probably write some more emails and organise what I’m going to do the next day.