New research project funded by the Medical Research Council

Thanks to new funding, Professor Nasir Rajpoot, Computer Science, will look at new ways to analyse and profile the environments of tumours.

He'll be working with fellow Warwick academics Professor David Epstein and Dr Richard Savage from Maths and Statistics, alongside pathologists at UCHW NHS Trust and the University of Nottingham.

They will develop sophisticated tools for 'image analytics' to find spatial trends and patterns in certain groups (for example, patient groups whose cancer is likely to advance more aggressively) and then try out those tools with local hospitals.

Professor Rajpoot is confident that this prestigious award will help them to find image-based markers of disease progression and survival, meaning eventually they can select treatments based on what each patient personally needs. He says that:

Understanding and analysing the tissue microenvironment is not only crucial to assessing the grade and aggressiveness of disease and for predicting its course, it can also help us better understand how genomic alterations manifest themselves as structural changes in the tissue microenvironment.

Professor David Snead from UCHW adds:

We have long understood that cancer is partly a battle of tumour cells versus host defences. Using digital analysis of histopathology slides allows us to use an entirely novel way of examining this interplay, which will give new insights into why some tumours progress and others do not.

You can read a bit more on the original press release. Meanwhile we're looking forward to reporting the team's findings back to you over time.