Unfortunately ovarian cancer is very difficult to treat for two really important reasons: firstly
it's very difficult to diagnose early and by the time
a woman with ovarian cancer has got symptoms there's already spread around the tummy, the abdomen.
And secondly it's a very complex disease at the genetic level, the changes within the cancer cells
are very complex and the cancer is very good at adapting and overcoming its sensitivity to treatment.
So in other words patients become resistant to treatment quite quickly.
Well there are two big sort of exciting developments on the imaging compass; one is
the use of artificial intelligence to automate a lot of tumour evaluation in terms of tumour
burden which ultimately leads to far more accurate, quicker assessment of tumour response. And the other
really big sort of new development is the use of metabolic imaging which can give a very quick
accurate readout if the tumour is responds or not. Really after one cycle of chemotherapy this can
be done by various PET traces but also with carbon 13. So really does the drug work yes or
no if it doesn't what is the next drug to use or the next treatment strategy really.
So Integrated Cancer Medicine is our approach to dealing with very complex diseases like ovarian cancer.
So what we're trying to do is to bring together all the things we can measure in a patient, the
clinical features, the imaging, the molecular tests the tumour at very high scale and resolution in one place.
And by studying patients in this very, very detailed way we think we're going to do a better
job of pulling out the complexity of the disease and understanding the patterns when they happen.
Well I think the most exciting thing about new treatments for ovarian cancer has been the
development of medicines that patients can take after their initial chemotherapy and surgery like
the PARP inhibitors. These are game changing in terms of helping to control the disease for longer.
And I think the really important thing about this is it tells us that changing treatments
and bringing new combinations of treatment around the PARP medicines may actually lead to many more
cures than we've seen over the past 20 years.
One of the collaborations that has been very successful
and we're very, very excited to work with is with the General Electric and
it's really creating a visualization platform. I'm really excited that patients have on one snapshot
they'll see their disease, they'll see their treatment journey, they'll see their pathway
and that will allow them together with their treating physician to actually make
much more informed decisions. They'll be really in control of their disease and their choices.
So my vision for ovarian cancer is that we will break through the barriers that are about trying
to choose the best time to have chemotherapy, the best time to have surgery and that we can now
using the advanced imaging methods that Evis is developing, plus the genomics,
work out when a patient will really benefit from treatment, if they
aren't going to benefit switch them to a trial or a new treatment that will benefit them.
And at the moment we have no easy way of doing this because of the limitations
of all the data sets and trying to bring it together in real time for the individual.
My vision is that we are going to have a much more integrated and intelligent way
of tracking the tumour dynamics on the patient throughout their journey. Doing that
in a very cohesive way from the macroscopic sort of imaging phenotypic part but also from genomics
so ultimately we deliver that integrated care in a way that we're not able to deliver it today.
I think Cambridge is very well placed we have an exciting vision with the cancer research hospital.
A hospital that uniquely is embedding institutes for research into an NHS hospital.
And I think that's going to lead to huge benefits for patient care not just in Cambridge
but also the ability to share those experiences and that
know-how outside Cambridge, across the eastern region, across the world.