We are thrilled to announce that we will be joined by Prof. Azra Raza on Monday 3^rd April 2-3.30pm UK time. This online seminar is being organised as a collaboration with the TIA Centre Seminar Series, Health GRP and Warwick Cancer Centre.

Speaker: Prof. Azra Raza

Affiliation: Columbia University Medical Center, New York, USA

Zoom link: https://zoom.us/j/96894225818?pwd=c2FBQmo0OVJGT0F0cU03N1Zpd0xGQT09Link opens in a new window

Title: THE FIRST CELL and the human costs of pursuing cancer to the last

Abstract: Cancer will strike 1 in 2 men and 1 in 3 women. Yet, we are failing spectacularly to improve outcome for the majority of patients. Our contention is that the real solution to the cancer problem is to diagnose cancer early, at the stage of The First Cell. The footprints of early cancers, the surrogate biomarkers, need to be identified so we can detect the first cell. The rapidly evolving technologies are doing much in this area but need to be expanded. We study a pre-leukemic condition called myelodysplastic syndrome (MDS) with the hope that we can detect the first leukemia cells as the disease transforms to acute myeloid leukemia (AML). Towards this end, we have collected blood and bone marrow samples on MDS and AML patients since 1984. Today, our Tissue Repository has more than 60,000 samples. We propose novel methods to identify surrogate markers that can identify the First Cell through studying the serial samples of patients who evolve from MDS to AML.