Background
Metastatic melanoma is a hard-to-treat disease. It remains one of the most worrisome forms of cancer. There is an urgent need to improve the current therapies, such as chemotherapy and radiotherapy, as these have limited efficacy. Moreover, a single therapy is not efficient to tackle metastatic melanoma. A combination of therapies is thus emerging as a necessity to efficiently eradicate all cancer cells.
Recently, the development of immunotherapies has shown promises, in particular chimeric antigen receptor (CAR)-T cells. Nevertheless, the physical barriers represented by cellular and non-cellular components of the tumor microenvironment combined to the abnormal tumor vasculature and high interstitial fluid pressure, hamper an efficient tumor infiltration of CAR-T cells.
Objectives
Thanks to a network of 18 project partners (including 10 non-academic partners), MELOMANES will train 12 doctoral researchers to develop a combined therapy using magnetic nanoparticles to damage the tumor microenvironment through magnetic and optic hyperthermia, while facilitating the infiltration of CAR-T cells.
Research and transferable training of the doctoral researchers will be performed in a highly interdisciplinary, intersectoral, and international environment. In addition to technical skills, they will be trained in open science, communication and dissemination, responsible research and innovation, circular economy, ethics, data management, entrepreneurship, marketing, intellectual property, and gender dimensions in research. Their competences will be validated through certification and qualification examination, allowing a new generation of highly skilled doctoral researchers to emerge with a high-level training, in particular in the multidisciplinary field of nanomedicine.
The project aims to:
- Create a training programme that helps the doctoral researchers in the project to develop three key capacities:
- Navigating complexity and uncertainty
- Critically reflecting on the role of research in society and its social and future consequences
- Designing and facilitating meaningful dialogue with societal actors
- Implement the training programme in the MELOMANES project
- Evaluate whether the designed and implemented training programme was effective, and create guidelines that facilitate the design of tailor-made training programmes specifically for trans- and inter- disciplinary research fields
Approach
For the design of the training programme, we will make use of systems thinking methodologies and artistic methods. The systems thinking methodologies will be an important point of departure for designing training sessions on navigating complexity and uncertainty, while doing highly specialised research work. The artistic methods will be of help in designing training sessions with a focus on developing researchers’ reflexive capacities and initiating dialogue with project stakeholders and society at large.
Athena’s role
Athena researchers will design and implement the training programme that helps the doctoral researchers of the MELOMANES project to become researchers of the future. Over the past decades, we have witnessed a change in the relation between the science and society. It has become increasingly important for researchers to not merely be able to conduct technical and scientific research, but to actively engage with society as well.
The skill set of a capable researcher entails the ability to align research practices and agendas with societal needs and concerns, and to critically reflect on social and future consequences of the research itself, while navigating its inherent complexity and uncertainty. By following the training programme designed by Athena, the doctoral researchers of the MELOMANES project will be prepared for the broad and diverse expectations that are part of current and future academic work.