News
On Monday 10th February, we welcomed over 140 members from across Imperial, the ICR and our partner institutions to our Annual Symposium which focussed on ‘Precision Medicine and the Use of Data in Cancer Research’.
As the need for personalised medicine grows in cancer care, so does the need for precision diagnostic methods that can accurately identify patients who would benefit from tailored treatments. At present, most clinical decisions are made from tests that rely on a limited number of biomarkers, often just one, combined with the expertise of oncologists, pathologists, radiologists, and other specialists. However, to fully realise the potential of personalised medicine, research must evolve to identify more complex biomarkers by integrating information from multiple sources, also known as multi-modal data. Multi-modal data could include information from biological samples, medical scans or images, patient-reported outcomes, and diverse biological and written information. This raises an important question: can the human mind alone effectively process such vast amounts of data, or does the advancement of complex biomarkers inherently require machine learning and artificial intelligence?
This year’s Annual Symposium of the CRUK Convergence Science Centre explored these challenges, examining progress in complex biomarker design alongside the latest advancements in personalised cancer medicine. The symposium also marked the announcement of the Centre’s new strategy by Scientific Director Professor Axel Behrens, focusing on personalised diagnostics, therapies and interventions, and therapy monitoring.
The first session of the symposium explored the role of mathematics, machine learning, and artificial intelligence in biomarker design.
Dr Anthea Monod from Imperial presented how her team applies persistent homology, a mathematical technique based on topology, to quantify image morphology and diagnose acute myeloid leukaemia progression from bone marrow images.
This was followed by Professor Manuel Salto-Tellez from the ICR, who provided an overview of advances in digital pathology and demonstrated how artificial intelligence could transform diagnostics. He highlighted how AI could bridge the gap between pathologists and other clinicians, improving the integration of information and leading to more precise, efficient, and cost-effective diagnoses.
Professor Richard Festenstein from Imperial then offered a fascinating perspective from outside the field of oncology, showing how AI-assisted motion capture technology, originally developed for the film industry, is being combined with simple blood biomarker tests to diagnose and monitor the progression of Friedreich’s ataxia and Duchenne muscular dystrophy.
Dr Anthea Monod
Following these discussions, one of our Centre’s PhD students, Elizabeth Flittner, presented her work on barcode technology, a novel approach to studying cancer evolution in discovery research. This technology holds promise for identifying new biomarkers of cancer progression and resistance.
Lizzie Flittner
Before the break, the audience was shown a short film, developed by the lead of our Centre’s Catalyst Team Dr Patrick Kierkegaard and supported by Pancreatic Cancer UK. The film highlighted how pancreatic cancer is often diagnosed late with devastating consequences for patient survival, powerfully illustrating the urgent need for new tests for earlier detection.
The second session of the symposium focused on advances in personalised medicine for breast and gynaecological cancers.
Professor Christina Fotopoulou from Imperial discussed her work on personalising surgical interventions in ovarian cancer based on biological insights and establishing a classification system for endometrial cancer for better clinical assessment.
This was followed by Professor Cathrin Brisken from the ICR, who emphasised the importance of understanding the relationship between hormones and breast cancer in order to develop personalised prevention and treatment strategies for hormone-dependent breast cancer.
Dr Rachael Natrajan then presented her latest research on genetic profiling in therapy-resistant breast cancer, highlighting how deeper insights into genetic and epigenetic mechanisms can improve treatment approaches for patients who stop responding to chemotherapy.
Prof Cathrin Brisken
The symposium concluded with a keynote talk by Professor Kanaga Sabapathy from Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, who revisited one of the oldest and most well-known cancer hallmarks, the tumour suppressor gene p53 and its mutations. He explored new strategies aimed at restoring the function of this critical "guardian of the genome”, offering fresh perspectives on how p53-targeted therapies could be developed.
Prof Kanaga Sabapathy
Thanks to the support of Cancer Research UK, where the Centre receives funding from, we’re able to put on events like this that foster cross institutional collaboration and explore topical themes within the convergence science space. This year’s discussions underscored the need for continued innovation in biomarker discovery and personalised medicine. By integrating advanced technologies such as artificial intelligence and multi-modal data analysis, the future of cancer diagnosis and treatment is moving towards greater precision, efficiency, and improved patient outcomes.