The Oxford-Bristol Myers Squibb Fellowship Programme was established in 2015 with the aim of stimulating new scientific discovery and translation and to generate a cohort of scientists that can navigate within and across both academic and industry spheres to bridge translational challenges. Oxford’s relationship with Bristol Myers Squibb continues to grow year on year, with the new 2021 fellowships taking the total of Oxford-Bristol Myers Squibb Fellows to over 30.
The popularity of the programme was apparent again this year with 24 high-quality applications. The BMS-Oxford selection committee faced the difficult task of selecting a subset of these for funding in this cycle based on alignment with BMS research areas and co-mentor expertise, preliminary data and plausibility, and applicability to translation of the hypotheses being tested.
The new Oxford-BMS Fellowships will support six postdoctoral researchers and clinicians across six departments within the Medical Sciences Division and Mathematical, Physical and Life Sciences Division, providing an opportunity for them to gain exposure to the field of commercial drug discovery and development.
RDM Principal Investigators on the projects include Professor Stefan Neubauer, and Associate Professors Oliver Rider and Karthik Ramasamy.
The six new Fellowships for 2021
| Fellow | Project | Principal Investigators |
| Roshan Xavier | Novel biomarkers of cardiopulmonary function in heart failure with preserved ejection fraction using exercise magnetic resonance | Andrew Lewis (Department of Physiology, Anatomy and Genetics), Stefan Neubauer and Oliver Rider (Radcliffe Department of Medicine) |
| TBC | Frozen shoulder: A human disease model of resolving inflammatory fibrosis | Stephanie Dakin and Christopher Buckley (Nuffield Department of Orthopaedics, Rheumatology and Musculoskeletal Sciences) |
| Charlotte Palmer | Exploring Polycomb repressive complex as therapeutic targets in high risk multiple myeloma patient subsets | Udo Oppermann and Adam Cribbs (Nuffield Department of Orthopaedics, Rheumatology and Musculoskeletal Sciences), Karthik Ramasamy (Radcliffe Department of Medicine) |
| TBC | Novel inhibitors of immune receptor signalling | Ricardo Fernandes (Nuffield Department of Medicine Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences Oxford Institute) |
| TBC | Assessing and targeting adaptive epithelial-stromal-immune co-evolution solid tumours | Simon Leedham (Nuffield Department of Medicine), Elizabeth Mann and Mark Coles (Nuffield Department of Orthopaedics, Rheumatology and Musculoskeletal Sciences) |
| TBC | Translational investigation of lysolipids as a therapeutic target for neuroinflammatory and neuro-degenerative disorders | Sridhar Vasudevan (Department of Pharmacology), Russell Foster and Aarti Jagannath (Nuffield Department of Clinical Neurosciences) |
Read more on the Medical Sciences Division website.