Centre for Image Guided Therapy - A Theranostic Approach to Patients with Cancer

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Our vision is to revolutionise diagnosis, risk stratification and therapy for people with cancer based on innovations in magnetic resonance (MR) technology. The new system of care will be based on developing a strategy of optimized 'target generation', specific 'target verification' and precise 'target destruction'We use imaging to find out where cancer lies within the body. We call the process of taking an image to find a lesion 'target generation'. Whilst imaging helps to find disease we don't always know whether a lesion on an image is cancer or whether it is benign. Also, if a lesion is cancer we don't often know what that means for the individual patient. By way of explanation, we may know that a particular distribution of cancer spread within the body confers a poorer outcome for a group of patients e.g. a 50% of patients survive after 5-years; however, we often can't tell whether an individual patient will fall into the 50% that survive. Understanding the nature of a lesion detected on imaging and how this impacts on treatment choices and overall treatment outcome is termed 'target verification'.Our proposal seeks to establish a platform to allow new methods and advances we have been making in pre-clinical 'target generation' to be robustly and rapidly developed for clinical use. It also seeks to develop the best imaging technologies and combine these with an understanding of the cellular and molecular environment of cancers in order to significantly improve 'target verification'. The third aspect to our proposal is the development of new technologies to deliver precise treatment to individual cancer sites. We term this 'target destruction'. A range of technologies exist and we aim to provide the environment where the best and most promising of these can be easily translated from conception of idea all the way to clinical application. We have a strong track record in this area with therapies for prostate cancer and we seek to extend this to other cancer sites, initially lung and gastrointestinal cancers. Our proposal brings together a group of scientist with complementary skills in imaging, surgery and engineering in one location through establishing a dedicated Centre for Image Guided Therapy within University College London. Within this we seek to establish a translational imaging facility, which will reflect the type of imaging available within the clinical environment, and will also allow scientists access to the cutting-edge equipment to enable them to develop technological advances rapidly and robustly to a stage that they can be applied for patient benefit.