Introducing Ritika Saxena, the Hawkesbury Canoe Classic PhD Scholar for 2022!

Ritika Saxena has been awarded this year’s Hawkesbury Canoe Classic PhD scholarship for her stem cell research project aiming to help patients with blood cancers or bone marrow failure. After losing her grandmother to multiple myeloma (a cancer of plasma cells) almost a decade ago, Ritika hopes this research will help other families affected by cancer. 

Ritika is conducting her PhD research at the Murdoch Children’s Research Institute, and her work focuses on understanding the formation of haematopoietic stem cells (HSCs) – rare cells that have self-renewal capacity and the ability to regenerate all the different cell types that comprise the blood forming system. 

“Donor HSCs, ideally from matched siblings, are used in bone marrow transplants to treat patients with blood cancers or bone marrow failure,” she said. “However, for patients who do not have a perfectly matched donor, this treatment may not be available.”

Ritika will study how these cells can be made in the lab from a patient’s own cells to enable future scientist to generate HSCs for those who lack a perfectly matched donor.

Ritika works in the Blood Disease and Blood Development labs at Murdoch Children’s Institute. When not in the laboratory, Ritika is busy promoting and sharing the learnings of her medical research project at various forums including the recent Australian Society for Medical Research Student Symposium where she was awarded a prize for her presentation. 

This drive and passion for her work contributed to Ritika being awarded the Arrow PhD Scholarship for 2022. 

Ritika feels honoured to have received the award saying, “A PhD is an incredible time in your life. One where you are given independence with your research. What we do in the lab underpins the treatments of tomorrow. So when someone asks me why I do long hours and weekend work, it’s because I don’t take the impact my research can have lightly. And thanks to funding opportunities like these, I can really focus on my research and not worry about the financial implications of still being in grad school”.

It gives us great pleasure to be supporting Ritika in conducting this research and we  give thanks to the Hawkesbury Canoe Classic for their outstanding fundraising which enables exceptional students like Ritika the opportunity to conduct promising medical research in the field of bone marrow and stem cell transplant.

To be a part of the Hawkesbury Canoe Classic this year and help raise funds for the Arrow PhD Program visit www.canoeclassic.net