Integrated Cancer Medicine: Research in Focus CRUK Cambridge Centre

In today's episode, Ellie Wolmark is joined by Natalie Ellis, Ellen Nowak and Lauren Gardiner Walton to talk about the development of the Arts Strategy for the Cambridge Cancer Research Hospital (CCRH). They also discuss the benefits of the arts in cancer care and in supporting patient treatment and recovery.

If you would like to get involved in the CCRH project by joining any of the groups that Ellen mentions in this episode, further information can be found at: www.cambridgecancer.org.uk/our-community/get-involved

Natalie is Head of Arts at Cambridge University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust.

Ellen is an Arts Programme Manager at Cambridge University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust.

Lauren is a member of the CCRH Environment Design Working Group as well as being Curator of the Cambridge University Herbarium, and was recently treated for cancer.

About CUH Arts:
CUH Arts is Cambridge University Hospitals' arts-in-health programme, dedicated to shaping care through creativity. They strive to promote wellbeing, distract from illness, and improve the hospital experience by providing excellent creative and cultural opportunities for patients, staff, visitors and the wider community. Embedded within one of the world's leading hospital trusts, their diverse, person-centred, multi-disciplinary programme of live, participatory and visual arts is facilitated and managed by an expert team of arts professionals in collaboration with artists and cultural partners.

In this episode, Professor Charlotte Coles talks about her work on the personalisation of radiation techniques to give patients with cancer the best chance of cure with the least side effects.

Charlotte is Professor of Breast Cancer Clinical Oncology and Deputy Head of the Department of Oncology at the University of Cambridge, UK. She is also the Director of CRUK RadNet Cambridge.

In this week's episode, Professor Florian Markowetz talks about his work and recent publication on chromosomal instability. Chromosomal instability is a dynamic process of DNA change, which leads to some DNA being present multiple times and some being lost altogether. Some cancers are dominated by this process of genomic disruption; ovarian, pancreatic and triple-negative breast cancer for example. These chaotic DNA changes mean that there are not good biomarkers present to guide treatment decisions. Florian's laboratory has found a structure underlying chromosomal instability and has identified genomic fingerprints which enable them to read out the fundamental reasons for the DNA changes.

Florian is a group leader at the Cancer Research UK Cambridge Institute at the University of Cambridge, UK.

Dr Marcel Gehrung talks about how his research at the CRUK Cambridge Centre led him to co-found the start-up Cyted with Rebecca Fitzgerald, Professor of Cancer Prevention and Director of the Early Cancer Institute at the University of Cambridge, UK, and Maria O'Donovan, lead pathologist for upper gastrointestinal cancer and diagnostic cytology at Cambridge University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust.

Cyted combines innovative AI-driven diagnostics with a new sample collection method to detect and prevent oesophageal cancer, developed at Cambridge University.

In this week's fascinating episode, Ellie Wolmark is joined by Dr Dario Bressan to discuss how the Cancer Grand Challenges team IMAXT has brought cancer researchers together with astronomers and video game designers to build the world's first virtual reality map of a tumour. By developing this entirely new way to study cancer, team IMAXT could revolutionise the diagnosis and treatment of people with the disease.

Dario is Head of the IMAXT Laboratory at the CRUK Cambridge Institute at the University of Cambridge.

Cancer Grand Challenges is a funding initiative co-founded by Cancer Research UK and the National Cancer Institute in the US.

In the first episode of part three, podcast host Ellie Wolmark is joined by Professor Robert Rintoul and Lauren Wallis to talk about biological sampling. They discuss what biosamples and biobanks are, how they are collected and used, and why they are so important for both patient treatment and cancer research.

Robert is Professor of Thoracic Oncology in the Department of Oncology at the University of Cambridge, and Honorary Consultant Respiratory Physician at Royal Papworth Hospital.

Lauren is Translational Research Manager in the Urological Malignancies Programme at the CRUK Cambridge Centre, University of Cambridge.