探花直播 of Cambridge - GE Healthcare

探花直播women helping to change the story of ovarian cancer

lw355 — Mon, 24 Jan 2022 13:40:02 +0000

Every patient with cancer has a story to tell of their journey through diagnosis and treatment. We meet a group of women who are at the centre of pioneering research in Cambridge that鈥檚 changing the outcome of ovarian cancer 鈥� helping to create treatments that are as unique as their stories.

Collaboration could enable cancer patients to get faster and more personalised treatment

cjb250 — Mon, 29 Nov 2021 00:01:15 +0000

Building on research supported by 探花直播Mark Foundation for Cancer Research and Cancer Research UK, the collaboration aims to address the problems of fragmented or siloed data and disconnected patient information, which is challenging for clinicians to manage effectively and can prevent cancer patients receiving optimal treatment.

鈥淭hanks to ever-improving technologies, we now generate increasing amounts of complex data for each patient with cancer,鈥� said Professor Richard Gilbertson, Director of the Cancer Research UK Cambridge Centre, and Head of the Department of Oncology at the 探花直播 of Cambridge. "These include multiple imaging scans, digital pathology, genomic data, advanced blood tests and treatment information. Bringing all this data together to make precise and informed decisions for patients can be hard. We often do this inefficiently and miss important connections between the data."

This new application would be designed using advanced software engineering and machine learning methods to integrate a variety of patient data including clinical, imaging and genomic data - from diagnosis through every stage of treatment - into one single location. 探花直播aim is to offer all medical teams involved in a patient鈥檚 cancer care - medical oncologists, clinical oncologists, surgeons, radiologists, pathologists, clinical nurse specialists and more - simultaneous access to the necessary data and information to allow the medical team to plan the best, most personalised treatment for each of their patients.

探花直播application is expected to be evaluated for ovarian cancer initially in Cambridge and the goal is to evaluate it across the UK, and beyond. Ovarian cancer is often difficult to treat as most patients present with advanced disease. Although initially 70-80% of patients will respond well to chemotherapy, ultimately most develop chemotherapy resistance leading to treatment failure. 聽探花直播application may help clinicians have better visibility on how the patient respond to treatment, thus helping them more effectively identify when treatment may require adjustment. If the application is successfully developed, our vision is for it to be expanded for use in breast and kidney cancer patients.

鈥淗ealthcare professionals can struggle to easily find and interpret the many different types of patient data information they need to make the best clinical decisions,鈥� said Dr Ben Newton, GM Oncology at GE Healthcare. 鈥淏ringing these multiple data streams into a single interface could enable clinicians to make fast, informed and highly personalised treatment decisions throughout a patient鈥檚 cancer care pathway.鈥�

Two Addenbrooke鈥檚 cancer clinicians aiming to evaluate the application to help patients are consultant oncologist Professor James Brenton, professor of Ovarian Cancer Medicine and a senior group leader at the Cancer Research UK Cambridge Institute; and consultant radiologist Professor聽Evis Sala, professor of Oncological Imaging, 探花直播 of Cambridge.

鈥淎ggregating and analysing the substantial amounts of data available would help address an unmet need. Ovarian cancer is an important and complex disease with poor outcomes, and we believe this application would help us deal with its complexity. Eventually, we hope to be able to better understand the disease and therefore improve treatment and outcomes for patients,鈥� says Professor Brenton, who co-leads the Mark Foundation Institute for Integrated Cancer Medicine (MFICM) at the 探花直播 of Cambridge.

鈥淚f we can aggregate and integrate relevant data along the care pathway, and visualize the output, it may ultimately lead to clinicians making better-informed decisions and better care.鈥� adds Professor聽Sala who also co-leads the MFICM at the 探花直播 of Cambridge.

鈥� 探花直播team aims to transform the delivery of cancer patient care by integrating multiple data streams together into a single platform that can be accessed simultaneously by clinicians, patients and multi-disciplinary teams from tertiary and regional hospitals.鈥�

探花直播development work will be underpinned by GE Healthcare鈥檚 Edison platform to integrate data from diverse sources, such as electronic health records聽and radiology information systems, imaging and other medical device data.

GE Healthcare, the 探花直播 of Cambridge and Cambridge 探花直播 Hospitals have agreed to collaborate on developing an application aiming to improve cancer care, with Cambridge providing clinical expertise and data to support GE Healthcare鈥檚 development and evaluation of an AI-enhanced application that integrates cancer patient data from multiple sources into a single interface.

Ovarian cancer is an important and complex disease with poor outcomes, and we believe this application would help us deal with its complexity

James Brenton

geralt

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Cambridge extends world leading role for medical imaging with powerful new brain and body scanners

cjb250 — Mon, 24 Oct 2016 07:22:25 +0000

探花直播equipment, funded by the Medical Research Council (MRC), Wellcome Trust and Cancer Research UK, sits within the newly-refurbished Wolfson Brain Imaging Centre (WBIC), which today celebrates two decades at the forefront of medical imaging.

At the heart of the refurbishment are three cutting-edge scanners, of which only a very small handful exist at institutions outside Cambridge 鈥� and no institution other than the 探花直播 of Cambridge has all three. These are:

a Siemens 7T Terra Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) scanner, which will allow researchers to see detail in the brain as tiny as a grain of sand
a GE Healthcare PET/MR scanner that will enable researchers to collect critical data to help understand how cancers grow, spread and respond to treatment, and how dementia progresses
a GE Healthcare hyperpolarizer that enables researchers to study real-time metabolism of cancers and other body tissues, including whether a cancer therapy is effective or not

These scanners, together with refurbished PRISMA and Skyra 3T MRI scanners at the WBIC and at the Medical Research Council Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit, will make the Cambridge Biomedical Campus the best-equipped medical imaging centre in Europe.

Professor Ed Bullmore, Co-Chair of Cambridge Neuroscience and Scientific Director of the WBIC, says: 鈥淭his is an exciting day for us as these new scanners will hopefully provide answers to questions that we have been asking for some time, as well as opening up new areas for us to explore in neuroscience, mental health research and cancer medicine.

鈥淏y bringing together these scanners, the research expertise in Cambridge, and the latest in 鈥榖ig data鈥� informatics, we will be able to do sophisticated analyses that could revolutionise our understanding of the brain 鈥� and how mental health disorders and dementias arise 鈥� as well of cancers and how we treat them. This will be a powerful research tool and represents a big step in the direction of personalised treatments.鈥�

Dr Rob Buckle, Director of Science Programmes at the MRC, adds: 鈥� 探花直播MRC is proud to sponsor this exciting suite of new technologies at the 探花直播 of Cambridge. They will play an important role in advancing our strategy in stratified medicine, ultimately ensuring that the right patient gets the right treatment at the right time.鈥�

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Slide show: Click on images to expand

7T Medical Resonance Imaging (MRI) scanner

探花直播Siemens 7T Terra scanner 鈥� which refers to the ultrahigh strength of its magnetic field at 7 Tesla 鈥� will allow researchers to study at unprecedented levels of detail the workings of the brain and how it encodes information such as individual memories. Current 3T MRI scanners can image structures 2-3mm in size, whereas the new scanner has a resolution of just 0.5mm, the size of a coarse grain of sand.

鈥淥ften, the early stages of diseases of the brain, such as Alzheimer鈥檚 and Parkinson鈥檚, occur in very small structures 鈥� until now too small for us to see,鈥� explains Professor James Rowe, who will be leading research using the new 7T scanner. 鈥� 探花直播early seeds of dementia for example, which are often sown in middle age, have until now been hidden to less powerful MRI scanners.鈥�

探花直播scanner will also be able to pick up unique signatures of neurotransmitters in the brain, the chemicals that allow its cells to communicate with each other. Changes in the amount of these neurotransmitters affect how the brain functions and can underpin mental health disorders such as depression and schizophrenia.

鈥淗ow a patient responds to a particular drug may depend on how much of a particular neurotransmitter present is currently present,鈥� says Professor Rowe. 鈥淲e will be looking at whether this new scanner can help provide this information and so help us tailor treatments to individual patients.鈥�

探花直播scanner will begin operating at the start of December, with research projects lined up to look at dementias caused by changes to the brain almost undetectable by conventional scanners, and to look at how visual and sound information is converted to mental representations in the brain.

PET/MR scanner

探花直播new GE Healthcare PET/MR scanner brings together two existing technologies: positron emission tomography (PET), which enables researchers to visualise cellular activity and metabolism, and magnetic resonance (MR), which is used to image soft tissue for structural and functional details.

Purchased as part of the Dementias Platform UK, a network of imaging centres across the UK, the scanner will enable researchers to simultaneously collect information on physiological and disease-related processes in the body, reducing the need for patients to return for multiple scans. This will be particularly important for dementia patients.

Professor Fiona Gilbert, who will lead research on the PET/MR scanner, explains: 鈥淒ementia patients are often frail, which can present challenges when they need separate PET and MR scanners. So, not only will this new scanner provide us with valuable information to help improve understanding and diagnosis of dementia, it will also be much more patient-friendly.鈥�

PET/MR聽 will allow researchers to see early molecular changes in the brain, accurately map them onto structural brain images and follow their progression as disease develops or worsens. This could enable researchers to diagnose dementia before any symptoms have arisen and to understand which treatments may best halt or slow the disease.

As well as being used for dementia research, the scanner will also be applied to cancer research, says Professor Gilbert.

鈥淎t the moment, we have to make lots of assumptions about what鈥檚 going on in tumour cells. We can take biopsies and look at the different cell types, how aggressive they are, their genetic structure and so on, but we can only guess what鈥檚 happening to a tumour at a functional level. Functional information is important for helping us determine how best to treat the cancer 鈥� and hence how we can personalise treatment for a particular patient. Using PET/MR, we can get real-time information for that patient鈥檚 specific tumour and not have to assume it is behaving in the same way as the last hundred tumours we鈥檝e seen.鈥�

探花直播PET/MR scanner will begin operation at the start of November, when it will initially be used to study oxygen levels and blood flow in the tumours of breast cancer patients and in studies of brain inflammation in patients with Alzheimer鈥檚 disease and depression.

Hyperpolarizer

探花直播third new piece of imaging equipment to be installed is a GE Healthcare hyperpolarizer, which is already up and running at the facility.

MRI relies on the interaction of strong magnetic fields with a property of atomic nuclei known as 鈥榮pin鈥�. By looking at how these spins differ in the presence of magnetic field gradients applied across the body, scientists are able to build up three-dimensional images of tissues. 探花直播hyperpolarizer boosts the 鈥榮pin鈥� signal from tracers injected into the tissue, making the MRI measurement much more sensitive and allowing imaging of the biochemistry of the tissue as well as its anatomy.

鈥淏ecause of underlying genetic changes in a tumour, not all patients respond in the same way to the same treatment,鈥� explains Professor Kevin Brindle, who leads research using the hyperpolarizer. 鈥淯sing hyperpolarisation and MRI, we can potentially tell whether a drug is working, from changes in the tumour鈥檚 biochemistry, within a few hours of starting treatment. If it鈥檚 working you continue, if not you change the treatment.鈥�

探花直播next generation of imaging technology, newly installed at the 探花直播 of Cambridge, will give researchers an unprecedented view of the human body 鈥� in particular of the myriad connections within our brains and of tumours as they grow and respond to treatment 鈥� and could pave the way for development of treatments personalised for individual patients.

By bringing together these scanners, the research expertise in Cambridge, and the latest in 鈥榖ig data鈥� informatics, we will be able to do sophisticated analyses that could revolutionise our understanding of the brain 鈥� and how mental health disorders and dementias arise 鈥� as well of cancers and how we treat them

Ed Bullmore

探花直播text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. For image use please see separate credits above.

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Watching cancer cells eat, breathe and die

bjb42 — Mon, 04 Jan 2010 14:27:46 +0000

Increasing the speed and sensitivity of detecting how tumour cells are responding to treatment is something of a Holy Grail in the field of oncology. Treatment response is still largely assessed by looking for a reduction in tumour size using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) or X-ray computed tomography. But many tumours may take weeks or even months to show evidence of regression and, in some cases, may not regress at all despite a positive response to treatment. How can an earlier indication of response be achieved so that clinicians can select the best treatment for an individual patient?

New techniques are being pioneered in Cambridge to 鈥榮ee鈥� tumour cells as never before. Research in Professor Kevin Brindle鈥檚 laboratory is developing a variety of clinically applicable, non-invasive, imaging techniques that measure tumour cells 鈥榚ating, breathing and dying鈥�.

Spin doctor

One approach under investigation by the Brindle lab is based on MRI. Although this technique has been around since the 1970s, the new imaging method has a crucial difference 鈥� instead of detecting the distribution and properties of water protons in tissue, which conventional MRI does, the new approach detects with much greater sensitivity than ever before the small molecules in tissues that are fundamental to their biochemistry. These are the carbon-based metabolites involved in producing energy and in making the constituents of the cell; a change in how these metabolites are being used can signal that an effective therapy is starting to kill the cells.

探花直播problem with carbon-based molecules is that they are present in tiny amounts compared with the protons in tissue water, making them hard to detect and almost impossible to image at high resolution. To overcome this, the Brindle group has been collaborating with GE Healthcare to develop a technique that increases MRI sensitivity by more than 10,000 times.

To achieve such a dramatic increase in sensitivity, the scientists have turned to nuclear spin hyperpolarisation. Before intravenous injection, a molecule labelled with an MR isotope of carbon is hyperpolarised so that a large proportion of the carbon nuclear spins line up with the magnetic field, as opposed to only a few in a million in a conventional MR experiment. 探花直播resulting gain in sensitivity means that the researchers can watch how the hyperpolarised carbon is metabolised by tumours, using this as a read-out for living and dying cells. Data published recently have shown how well this technique works for monitoring treatment response, and the first clinical trials are planned to start in 2010.

Personalising medicine

Different tumours are likely to require different imaging methods. With recent funding from the Leukaemia and Lymphoma Society, a new study has just begun in which several of the imaging methods under development in the Brindle group are being validated in models of lymphoma, so that the best reagents and protocols can be selected for future clinical trials.

Improved imaging methods are not only useful in the clinic, but will also be invaluable for early stage clinical trials of new drugs, where the need to establish whether new treatments are working is particularly acute. Professor Brindle is working with Professor Duncan Jodrell and Dr David Tuveson at the Cancer Research UK Cambridge Research Institute to develop imaging methods that allow treatment responses in individual patients to be measured immediately. Because patients with similar tumour types can show markedly different responses to the same therapy, imaging will be an important component of the armoury of 鈥榩ersonalised medicine鈥�, enabling the most effective treatment to be tailored to specific patients.

For more information, please contact Professor Kevin Brindle (kmb1001@cam.ac.uk) at the Department of Biochemistry and the Cancer Research UK Cambridge Research Institute/Li Ka Shing Centre. This research was published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2009) 106, 19801鈥�19806 and was funded principally by Cancer Research UK, with material support from GE Healthcare.

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Cancer cells can now be viewed as never before, thanks to cutting-edge imaging tools being developed in Cambridge.

Kevin Brindle

Lymphoma

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