This is the third time I’ve been to the summer school and in each case I’ve given a presentation on blood-borne biomarkers with a view to educating the students and the post-docs who are coming to this meeting. I find it’s very useful for me because I get to see young people who are making their career through science and also the opportunity to possibly bring people into the lab in Manchester if what I describe appeals to them.
Can you tell us a little about your presentation?
What I spoke about were picking up clues about cancer from a simple blood test from a cancer patient. What we actually do is we take apart the cells and the non-cellular part of blood and look at the DNA in the cells that we enrich. We enrich for tumour cells using markers that are only found on tumour cells. We also look at the cell-free component of blood and extract all of the DNA. In both of those we look at DNA sequences that tell us whether the tumour is detectable and if it is detectable what mutations can we pick up and are those mutations sufficiently informative to help us work out better therapies for the patients.
What’s so important about this summer school?
I think it’s got a very good basis of invited speakers, that’s not because of me but because of the other people who are part of this course. It’s very well balanced so it does a very good spread from the actual practical clinical side of things, the epidemiology. People who are involved in cancer all the way through the process from research to clinic and back again.
How are the opportunities for collaboration?
Yes, I mean we collaborate and communicate. The collaboration is largely communication and we communicate methodologies and findings to a large number of the people who attend the same conference. For some of those people we actually share grants so we actually take part in the European Union grant with some of the co-attendees of this meeting.
What should we really glean from all this?
I think education and cancer go hand-in-hand and we’ve got to do this type of summer school. I think it’s very, very important for the young people who are coming through the cancer research area to get a view of all aspects of cancer research. For me, because I am getting older now, what I am trying to do is to link what I do as research as much as I can to the clinic, to maximise the likelihood that what I’m doing having a benefit to the cancer patients. I think more and more researchers are doing that but there’s still plenty of room for the basic research but what you get a feel for in this conference is how you could translate what you see into something that could potentially benefit patients.
