Bitesize Episode 1 - Meet researcher Dr Mat Clement Artwork

Let's Talk About Brain Tumours

Join us as we talk about all things brain tumours with those who have been diagnosed, their friends, parents, partners and children as well as with researchers, fundraisers and advocates. Find out how The Brain Tumour Charity is working to improve outcomes for those who are diagnosed with this unforgiving disease.

Please Note: We recognise that everyone's experience's are unique. Our guests are sharing their own personal experiences of diagnosis, treatment and care. These may differ from yours or those of your loved one.

All Episodes

Let's Talk About Brain Tumours

Bitesize Episode 1 - Meet researcher Dr Mat Clement

February 13, 2026 • The Brain Tumour Charity • Season 3 • Episode 1

0:00 | 2:57

Welcome to a new series of very short episodes of The Brain Tumour Charity podcast in which you’ll get to know key people in the brain tumour community.

The first part of the series is called Meet The Researcher and it's based on a webinar we hosted in 2025 that was all about immunology.

We’re kicking it off by introducing you to someone who’s trying to figure out how our body’s natural defence mechanisms can help fight the aggressive brain tumour glioblastoma.

You can find out more about our Future Leaders programme and Dr Mat Clement's work here. We wish him the best of luck with the incredible work he's doing.

If you or someone you know needs a listening ear, you can contact our Support Team by calling 0808 800 0004, by using the web chat on our website or by emailing support@thebraintumourcharity.org

If you have any questions about this episode of the podcast, email podcast@thebraintumourcharity.org

Welcome to this bitesize episode of The Brain Tumour Charity's podcast. My name is Callum Ewing and I'm introducing a new series of very short episodes in which you'll get to know key people in the brain tumour community.

The first part of the series is called Meet The Researcher. It's based on our recording of a webinar we hosted in 2025 that was all about immunology.

We're kicking it off by introducing you to someone who's trying to figure out how our body's natural defence mechanisms can help fight glioblastoma.

MAT: "I'm Dr Mat Clement. I'm a Future Leader fellow from last year's cohort so I'm a researcher based at Cardiff University in South Wales.

I'm what I would class as being a passionate immunologist. I'm fascinated with your white blood cells and how we can manipulate and modify your immune cells, particularly we call them T-cells, to improve immunity.

For a long time I was working on T-cells and viral infection so, as you can imagine, during Covid I got very busy. And we were able to identify that these immune cells get into the brain to induce damage. But if you think about it, what we actually want to do is turn that off in the context of preventing damage. In the context of tumours we actually want to turn your immune cells on.

We have really fun ways and novel ideas now that we can use to overcome the protective barrier that's restricting your immune cells from becoming activated. So my Future Leader fellowship completely involves removing any immune suppression that's governed by the tumour, and so releasing the brakes in effect on your immune cells so you can heighten the immune response to prevent anybody from going through these diseases.

But of course this is tricky. How you actually deliver them into a patient is really important and we've got fun ways that we can add them now directly into the blood in your arm and these can traffic through and bypass the blood brain barrier. And we also have ways that they can be implanted directly into the head itself. This is all through modulating your white blood cells, your T-cells. and how we can manipulate these to prevent patients from suffering with brain tumours."

CALLUM: Thank you Mat and you can find out more about Mat's work on the charity's website. See the link in the show notes. Thank you for listening.

MUSIC