Personalising cancer diagnoses and care
FOR Professor William (Liam) Gallagher, studying biochemistry and genetics opened the way to a career in cancer research, and his lab has developed an exciting new approach to help people with breast cancer to avoid chemotherapy if they don’t need it.
Professor Gallagher works on ‘precision’ or ‘personalised’ medicine, which looks to diagnose disease and treat it in a more specific way, and he takes cancer as an example. “Cancer is often treated using chemotherapy, and this kills the cancer cells in many cases but it is not always a very specific treatment and people can have a lot of side- effects,” he explains. “In precision medicine, we look for a more targeted way of killing cancer cells so that the treatment is more effective and the patient has fewer side effects.”
After a science degree in University College Dublin in the 1990s, where he specialised in biochemistry and genetics, Professor Gallagher did a PhD in Glasgow and built up his career as a cancer researcher.
Today he is Professor of Cancer Biology at University College Dublin, where he directs the UCD Conway Institute of Biomolecular and Biomedical Research. He runs a busy lab that carries out research funded by the EU, Science Foundation Ireland and by the Irish Cancer Society into better ways to diagnose and treat various forms of cancer.
One of their discoveries is a better way to assess and predict which patients with early-stage breast cancer will need chemotherapy to stop the cancer spreading, and which patients can undergo surgery and hormone treatment and safely avoid chemotherapy.
Professor Gallagher co-founded a company called OncoMark, which is building on his lab’s discoveries to develop a kit called OncoMasTR for use in hospitals. “Our approach could help thousands of women each year around the world avoid unnecessary treatments and side-effects,” he says.
Personalised medicine is set to keep growing over the coming years as the technologies to diagnose and treat disease progress and as patients become more empowered and involved in their treatments, says Professor Gallagher, and this growth will be driven by developments in science, technology, engineering, maths and beyond.
“We are already seeing a huge growth in the overlap of the more traditional biology, where we are looking at cells and living systems, and computer science, which allows us to look at information about biology in a new way,” he says. “We also need engineers, mathematicians and psychologists and people who know about human behaviour, there is a wealth of opportunity in personalised medicine for people with these skills.”