Dr. Aileen Houston
Contact Details:
- Department of Medicine, Clinical Sciences Building, Cork University Hospital, Cork Location Map
- http://publish.ucc.ie/researchprofiles/C012/ahouston
Position:
Senior Research Scientist
Dr. Aileen Houston is a Senior Research Scientist in the Department of Medicine, University College Cork (UCC) and a Faculty Member of the Alimentary Pharmabiotic Centre (APC) Microbiome Ireland. Dr. Houston has a B.Sc. (Hons) in Biomedical Science from UCC and a Ph.D. in Medicine from UCC. She was awarded a Career Development Fellowship by the Health Research Board (HRB) Ireland in 2005, and was subsequently appointed as a Research Scientist in the Department of Medicine, UCC.
Research
Dr. Houston's research interests focus on inflammation and colon cancer, and on the chronic inflammation that promotes tumour progression. In particular, her group focuses on tumour-derived and stromal-derived inflammatory factors, such as IL-1 family members and member of the death receptor family, and their role in colon cancer progression, in the composition of the tumour microenvironment, and the tumour immune response. Additional studies focus on bacterial-derived factors and their role in gastrointestinal homeostasis. Such investigations are aimed at providing mechanistic insight into how novel inflammatory factors can be developed as novel immunotherapies for colon cancer, as well as in mechanisms of resistance to current anti-cancer therapies. Our investigations combine in vitro cell and molecular biology based approaches, functional genomics approaches, human biopsy tissue and in vivo pre-clinical models of cancer.