Jordanian doctor awarded prestigious cancer research award in UK

AMMAN — Jordanian doctor Noor Gammoh has been awarded £1.6 million (around JD1.4 million) by Cancer Research UK to fund her research into brain tumours.

Gammoh, 33, is one of only three researchers in the UK this year to have been awarded a prestigious Career Development Fellowship by the charity, according to the Edinburgh News website. 

She hopes her work will lead to new treatments for the most common type of brain tumour, called glioblastoma, the website reported.

The grant will allow her to set up her own research group at the Cancer Research UK Edinburgh Centre, a centre for brain tumour research based at Edinburgh University and the Western General Hospital. 

“We are trying to understand the mechanism that allows tumours to survive and continue to grow. Hopefully that will lead us to new ways to tackle the disease and improve survival rates,” she was quoted as saying by the news website.

“This is a kind of tumour where research has not made much advance for many years, so it is a tumour that needs more attention and focus so we can enhance the outcome for patients,” she added.

Gammoh first went to Scotland from Jordan in 2000 to study biological sciences as an undergraduate student at Edinburgh University. 

“I’m so pleased to have been awarded this fellowship because it will allow me to test my ideas in the lab and potentially find new ways to help more people survive this disease,” she said. 

The aim of Gammoh’s research will be to find out whether glioblastoma cells grow, survive and become resistant to treatment by using a “self-recycling” system that allows them to recycle old, damaged parts of the cells that are no longer needed. 

Gammoh said: “If we find that this ‘self-recycling’ mechanism is important in glioblastoma, we could use this information to develop new treatments for the disease that target this mechanism”, the website reported. 

After completing her undergraduate degree, Gammoh moved to Italy in 2003 to pursue her doctorate at the laboratory of Dr Lawrence Banks in Trieste, according to the Edinburgh University website. 

She relocated in 2013 to establish her own laboratory as a chancellor’s fellow at the University of Edinburgh where she continues her interests in investigating the molecular biology of autophagy and its relevance in aggressive cancer models such as glioblastoma, the university website said.