Cape Town - A University of the Western Cape doctorate graduate has been lauded in an international journal for her article on pathology and oncology.

Dr Catherine Rossouw’s article - “Evaluation of Protein Purification Techniques and Effects of Storage Duration on LC-MS/MS Analysis of Archived FFPE Human CRC Tissues”, was selected by the prestigious science journal, Pathology & Oncology Research (POR)’s Editor’s Pick for the 2021 collection.

The collection consists of 11 articles representing the most well-received articles published in POR last year.

These articles were selected because they “ display compelling advancement of the fields of pathology and oncology, as well as work bridging the gap between basic research and clinical medicine”.

The Paarl native said she worked extremely hard to complete her PhD, despite experiencing many obstacles and sacrifices.

“I am very grateful to all my co-authors for their valuable input and support. The project was designed with a multi-disciplinary group of researchers, and I feel that this approach determined its success. I have also had unwavering support from my supervisor, Professor Alan Christoffels, without whom this would not have been possible.”

Rossouw, who is a first-generation graduate on both paternal and maternal sides, says she hopes that she will have the opportunity to explore cancer genomics as a research topic soon.

Director and DST/NRF Research Chair in Bioinformatics, Professor Christoffels, congratulated Rossouw’s achievement and said that she worked “meticulously” on experiments to get supporting evidence showing which method is best to analyse proteins in colon cancer samples archived at hospitals.

“This is important because the field has not given any empirical evidence on which protein methods to use, and Catherine's work was able to provide that evidence. She has subsequently published another method paper. Her PhD was delayed by two years because of logistic errors, and then the Covid-19 pandemic lockdown period hit. She has persevered and graduated last year,” he said.

IOL

#oncology

UWC doctorate graduate’s article lauded internationally