Useful Lab Stuff

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Introduction

Useful Lab Stuff tries to provide useful tools and features that can help make lab work more efficient, it is years in the making and very much a hobby project so is very rough around the edges. It provides features such as an item database with plasmids, primers, cells and supernatant, an SOP database and some useful molecular calculators such as ligation and HiFi cloning ratios. In the future I hope to add a codon optimisation tool and also a search functionality or database of the plasmid parts, such as binders, signaling domains etc.

About Me

I am Dr. Benjamin Draper and I have been working in cancer research since 2013. My main interests lie in protein and cell engineering to make them better at targeting tumour cells.
I started my career in Dr. Martin Pule's lab at UCL where I learned a lot about molecular cloning and cell and protein engineering and researched CAR T-cells for haematological tumours.
I then moved to the lab of Dr. John Maher at KCL where I worked on translating the success of cell therapies for haematological tumours into effective therapies for solid tumours. I gained experience in a wide variety of techniques and gained appreciation for other immune cells, mainly gamma-delta T-cells but also monocytes and macrophages. I completed my PhD with Dr. Maher at his startup Leucid Bio where I worked on CAR T-cell signaling, cytokine release syndrome and dual targeting CAR T-cells.
I started my first post-doc placement in Dr. Laura Donovan's lab where I carried on my dual-targeting CAR T-cell work but also worked on projects looking at medulloblastoma (childhood brain cancer) biology, including mechanisms of relapse and resistance and mainly focussed on the tumour microenvironment.
I am now undertaking a second post-doc position in Dr. Masahiro Ono's lab at Imperial College London where we aim to understand the dynamics of T-cell signaling in response to immunotherapy, I also am still working on CAR T-cells and aiming to use the reporter models of the Ono lab to further understand and potentially provide a screening platform for developing effective CAR T-cell therapy.