Understanding disease biology in different tumour types will ultimately permit personalized medicine to be delivered to patients. Furthermore the very rapid changes in molecular targets and pathways associated with anti-cancer treatment, evident in days rather than weeks, means that we can in the future detect response to therapy much earlier than current clinical standards of radiological shrinkage (see figure below). For patients who do not respond to therapy, our strategy will prevent weeks or months of ineffective and potentially toxic therapy, together with a saving of the healthcare budget. This strategy also permits evaluation of the new class of mechanism-based cancer drugs directed at genetic, epigenetic and tumour microenvironment targets, and which are largely cytostatic in their mode of action.

* The group has recently been awarded external funding from Cancer Research UK-EPSRC-Department of Health (England) and the Medical Research Council to set up the new Imperial College London Comprehensive Cancer Imaging Centre and to increase its discovery activities.