Rate My Professor Eileen Parkes

Professor Eileen Parkes is Associate Professor of Innate Tumour Immunology and Consultant Medical Oncologist in Early Phase Trials at the University of Oxford. She holds the degrees MB BCh, BA(O) (Hons), MRCP (Onc), and PhD. Trained in medicine and oncology at Queen’s University Belfast, she joined the University of Oxford in 2019. Her research focuses on intrinsic inflammatory pathways in cancer, particularly the cGAS-STING signalling pathway and its interactions with chromosomal instability, DNA repair deficiency, and the tumour microenvironment. She was the first to describe constitutive innate immune signalling in BRCA1/2 mutant cancers that activates cGAS-STING signalling, work that has informed a clinical trial investigating a biomarker for BRCA1/2 deficiency in breast cancer and interest in STING agonists for BRCA1/2 mutant disease. Additional contributions include identifying a novel mechanism by which cGAS-cGAMP-STING signalling can be subverted via ENPP1 to promote tumour-mediated immunosuppression. She leads the Parkes Lab, which examines resistance mechanisms to immune-targeting treatments, the role of chromosomal instability in tumour initiation, progression, and response, and the influence of fibroblasts and the extracellular matrix in chromosomally unstable cancers. Professor Parkes was awarded a Wellcome Clinical Research Career Development Fellowship to investigate genetic instability and its effects on the immune microenvironment of oesophageal cancers. She has been appointed to lead Oxford’s Experimental Cancer Medicine Centre. Her recent publications address topics including chromosomal instability in oesophageal adenocarcinoma, anti-CTLA-4 checkpoint inhibitors, and neutrophil diversity in glioblastoma.