Imperial Festival April 2018

This year at the Imperial Festival, CRUK wanted to focus on multi-disciplinary research

There were two demos, I was on the demo explaining how was visualise cancer and how we can improve this. At the moment we current use 2D microscopes to visualise cells/cancer but this only gives us one "side" of the story. So while we think cancer cells are acting one way by what we see, they might be acting completely differently due to what we don't see. The blocks help us explain this by discussing one area of cancer research - invasion and metastasis. In some cases we see the cells or blocks and we can predict that the blocks will fit into the corresponding hole. And in some cases this is true. But in other cases, say we see a square down the microscope and we assume the block will act like a square but actually it's just one face of a triangle. Using 3D imagine such as "Light Sheet Fluorescent Microscopy" we can cut the cell up into individual images and then put these images together to form a 3D picture. Allowing us to say "that's a triangle not a square" and treat it correctly. 

Image courtesy of Cancer Research UK

Image courtesy of Cancer Research UK

The second demo was looking at the work the National Physics Laboratory (NPL) are doing on building the "Google Maps of Cancer". The NPL were CRUK Grand Challenge winners giving funding to expand this idea. 
The idea is to bring together all the information we have about cancer to go from the whole tumour down to the molecular level. We can use techniques such as Mass Spectrometry to gather information about cancer for example different metabolites produced by cancer compared to normal cells. The demo ask participants to scan the QC code on the blocks. This led to a neat short video about how mass spectrometry worked. At the end you go a result (i.e. the colour the block should be). You turn over the block and leave it. At the end of the day there should be an image from all the blocks turned over. 

For more information: ​http://www.npl.co.uk/grandchallenge/