Our Team

Professor Kerry Chester

Kerry heads the UCL Debbie Fund team. She has extensive experience in antibody engineering, phage-display technology and bench-to-bedside development of antibodies; including manufacture for clinical trials. Her main research interests are antibody discovery, construction of antibody-based therapeutics and interactions of these molecules with their targets. Current projects are centred on developing recombinant antibodies and fragments for use as cancer therapeutics, utilizing formats such as antibody drug conjugates (ADCs) and chimeric antigen receptors (CARs).

Magdalena Buschhaus

Magdalena Buschhaus, joined the Debbie Fund project in November 2018 after completing her PhD at the University of Aberdeen focused on developing shark derived antibody-like proteins for downstream antibody drug purification. As part of her PhD, Magdalena spent time at Merck in Darmstadt, Germany, along with previous scientific roles based at Elasmogen, MRC Technology and Pfizer, where she's gained expertise in phage display technology and early stage antibody drug discovery. Magdalena is isolating novel antibodies to cancer-specific proteins for delivery of toxic payloads, with the aim of developing a targeted treatment for cervical cancer.

Celia Lujan Nunez

Celia is an enthusiastic M.Sc. scientist with over ten years of experience in molecular biology and laboratory techniques. She loves microscopy, cell culture and getting her hands on experimental bench work. Celia happily joined the Debbie Fund Team in September 2020. She is generating and testing antibodies for the project, using cells lines to find out which of our candidate antibody-drug conjugates are most promising for clinical development.

Dr Tim Fenton

Tim joined the University of Kent School of Biosciences from UCL Cancer Institute in April 2017. He obtained his BSc in Molecular Biology and Biochemistry from the University of Durham in 2001, followed by a PhD at the Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research, UCL with Prof Ivan Gout, studying the ribosomal S6 kinases. In 2005 he took up a postdoctoral position in Prof Webster Cavenee’s lab at the University of California San Diego LICR branch, where he continued to work on growth factor signalling in cancer, uncovering a molecular mechanism that renders brain tumour cells resistant to drugs targeting the Epidermal Growth Factor Receptor. In 2011 he moved back to UCL, joining Prof Chris Boshoff’s Cancer Research UK Viral Oncology Lab, before gaining funding from Rosetrees Trust in 2014 to establish his independent research.