个人简介

Other external positions currently held Visiting Professor – King Saud University, Saudi Arabia Other external positions previously held Visiting Scientist – CABIMER Institute for Regenerative Medicine, Sevilla, Spain NIH Postdoctoral Fellow, Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, Seattle, USA MRC Research associate, Krebs Institute, University of Sheffield Educational Background Ph.D. Medical Genetics (Prof. John Saunders), Liverpool University, UK Dr McFarlane has served as a full member of the North West Cancer Research Committee for 5 years. He has reviewed regularly for international funding bodies and journals and has served as external Ph.D. examiner for a large number of national and international institutions.

研究领域

Dr McFarlane’s previous research has been aimed at understanding how complex organisms, such as humans, regulate and maintain genetic stability to avoid genetic disease such as cancer. Key findings in his group include the discovery that the mechanism that drives most caners, failures in DNA replication, does not occur uniformly throughout the genome (e.g., Pryce et al. 2009 Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA 106, 4770-4775) and, more recently, that a highly conserved set of proteins control the terminal regions, the telomeres, which are important in cancer progression and human aging (Gomez-Escobar et al. 2016 Oncotarget in press). They have extended their work to identify a large cohort of new cancer biomarker genes (e.g., Feichtinger et al. 2012 Oncotarget 3, 843-853; Feichtinger et al. 2014 Int. J. Cancer 134, 2359-2365) and are currently exploring ways in which the products of these genes can be used for the development of new drug targets.

Dr McFarlane’s group is interested in how cancer cells utilise germline / stem cell genes to control cell proliferation and genome dynamics. They are particularly interested in genes that regulate genome stability and cell division. His team not only works with human cancer cells and model organisms, but they also use human embryo stem cells and induced pluripotent stem cells. The ultimate aim of their work is to contribute insight to enable them to develop new diagnostic and patient stratification technologies and to identify and exploit new anti-cancer drug targets.

近期论文

查看导师新发文章 （温馨提示：请注意重名现象，建议点开原文通过作者单位确认）

Gomez-Escobar, N., Almobadel, N., Alzahrani, O., Feichtinger, J., Planells-Palop, V., Alshehri, Z., Thallinger, G., Wakeman, J.A., McFarlane, R.J.* (2016) Translin and Trax differentially regulate telomere-associated transcript homeostasis. Oncotarget inpress. Jezkova, J., Williams, J.S., Pinto, F., Sammut, S.J., Williams G.T., Gollins, S., McFarlane, R.J., Reis, R.M., Wakeman, J.A. (2016) Brachyury identifies a class of enteroendocrine Cells in normal human intestinal crypts and colorectal cancer. Oncotarget doi: 10.18632/oncotarget.7202. McFarlane, R.J.*, Feichtinger, J., Larcombe, L. (2015) Germline/meiotic genes in cancer: new dimensions. Cell Cycle 14: 791-792. Sammut, S.J., Feichtinger, J., Stuart, N., Wakeman, J.A., Larcombe, L., McFarlane, R.J.* (2014) A novel cohort of cancer-testis biomarker genes revealed through meta-analysis of clinical data sets. Oncoscience 1: 349-359. Almatrafi, A., Feichtinger, J., Vernon, E.G., Gomez-Escobar, N., Wakeman, J.A., Larcombe, L.D., McFarlane, R.J.* (2014) Identification of a class of human cancer germline genes with transcriptional silencing refractory to the hypomethylating druig 5-aza-2’-deoxycytidine. Oncoscience 1: 745-750. McFarlane, R.J.*, Feichtinger, J., Larcombe, L. (2014) Cancer Germline gene activation: friend or foe? Cell Cycle 13: 2151-2152. Jezkova, J., Williams, J.S., Jones-Hutchins, F., Sammut, S.J., Gollins, S., Cree, I., Coupland, S., McFarlane, R.J.*, Wakeman, J.A. (2014) Brachyury regulates proliferation of cancer cells via a p27kip1-dependent pathway. Oncotarget 5: 3813-3822. Feichtinger, J., McFarlane, R.J.*, Larcombe, L.D. (2014) CancerEST: a web-based tool for automatic meta-analysis of public expressed sequence tag data. Database 2014: bau024. Feichtinger, J., Larcombe, L.D., McFarlane, R.J.* (2014) Meta-analysis of expression of l(3)mbt tumour-associated germline genes supports the model that a soma-to-germline transition is a hallmark of human cancers. Int. J. Cancer 134: 2359-2365. Sammut, J.S., Wakeman, J.A., Stuart, N., McFarlane, R.J.* (2013) Cancer/Testis antigens and colorectal cancer. J. Genet. Syndr. Gene Ther. 4: 1000149 Feichtinger, J., McFarlane, R.J.*, Larcombe, L.D. (2012) CancerMA: a web-based tool for automatic meta-analysis of public cancer microarray data. Database 2012:bas055. Wakeman, J.A., Hmadcha, A., Soria, B., McFarlane, R.J.* (2012) The immortal strand hypothesis: still non-randomly segregating opinions. Biomol. Concepts 3: 203-211. Feichtinger, J., Aldeailej, I., Anderson, R., Almutairi, M., Almatrafi, A., Alsiwiehri, N., Griffiths, K., Stuart, N., Wakeman, J.A., Larcombe, L., McFarlane, R.J.* (2012) Meta- analysis of clinical data using human meiotic genes identifies a novel cohort of highly restricted marker genes. Oncotarget 3: 843-853 Jaendling, A., McFarlane, R.J.* (2010) Biological roles of translin and translin-associated factor X: RNA metabolism comes to the fore. Biochem J. 429: 225-234. McFarlane, R.J., Humphrey, T.C. (2010) A role for recombination in centromere function. Trends Genet. 26: 209-213. McFarlane, R. J.*, Mian, S., Dalgaard, J.Z. (2010) The many facets of the Tim-Tipin protein families’ roles in chromosome biology. Cell Cycle 9: 700-705. Spirek, M., Estreicher, A., Csaszar, E., Wells, J.L., McFarlane, R.J., Watts, F.Z., Loidl, J. (2010) SUMOylation is required for normal development of linear elements and wild- type meiotic recombination in Schizosaccharomyces pombe. Chromosoma 119: 59-72. McFarlane, R.J.*, Whitehall, S.K. (2009) tRNA genes in eukaryotic genome organization and reorganization. Cell Cycle 8: 3102-3106. Pryce, D.W., Ramayah, S., Jaendling, A., McFarlane, R.J.* (2009) Recombination at DNA replication fork barriers is not universal and is differentially regulated by Swi1. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA. 106: 4770-4775. *Denotes corresponding author.