"Since starting at the ICR I have already felt I am making a difference and that my work might potentially change somebody's life. This keeps me feeling really positive and smiling." Dr Burak Özkan is a Postdoctoral Training Fellow in the Epigenetics and Cancer team in the Division of Cancer Biology. He also recently cut his hair in support of the @officiallittleprincesstrust – one of our family charity partners. Dr Özkan is working to develop an in vitro assay for metastasis, when tumour cells leave their place of origin and migrate to healthy surrounding tissues or organs. He hopes his assay will help understand how the regulation of the way the DNA code is read can help to drive metastasis. He shares more about his research, motivations and experience at the ICR below: "I started my position in the Helin lab about six months ago. Although I am relatively new to the ICR, I love getting to know new people and finding out about the work they are doing. "Overcoming the complexity of cancer and how it continually evolves is a challenging goal for the ICR – and our ultimate mission. The complexity is reflected at the molecular level as cancer cells are often very heterogonous and show different levels of plasticity in tumour tissue. "Unfortunately, some of these cells gain the ability to leave the primary tumour tissue and invade secondary organs. The real reason why cancer is such a deadly disease is that 90% of cancer-related mortality is due to metastasis. I believe understanding the molecular mechanism of cancer metastasis will give us an edge in this battle against cancer." #PostDoc #PostdoctoralTrainingFellow #PostDocLife #PostDocJourney #PostDocChat #PostDocProject #Epigenetics #CancerBiology #CancerBiologyResearch #CancerResearch #CancerPostDoc #Genetics #DNA #InVitroAssay #MolecularBiology #MolecularBiologyAndGenetics #CancerMetastasis #Metastasis #ScientistsOfInstagram