Saving lives with virtual reality

Cancer Research UK is helping scientists beat cancer by developing technology that will unlock its secrets. You can help beat the disease too.

Tumour biopsies play a crucial role in a cancer patient’s journey. They provide doctors with vital information to guide their diagnosis and the patient’s treatment.

But to better understand cancer, doctors need to know more about a tumour: what types of cells are in it, how many cells there are, what they’re doing and where they’re located. Biopsies are useful, but the technologies currently in use look at the cell samples individually, rather than in the context of their surrounding environment. They provide researchers with vital information about the separate components of a tumour, but not an overview of how the cells interact with the tumour as a whole.

A detailed, 3D picture of a tumour would help doctors and scientists to develop new ways to diagnose and treat cancer. And that’s precisely what the team behind IMAXT is trying to provide them with.

IMAXT (Imaging and Molecular Annotation of Xenografts and Tumours) is combining existing techniques and developing new ones to build the first computerised 3D tumour that can be viewed in virtual reality. The scientists involved in the project come from a broad spectrum of research fields – medicine, astronomy, computer programming, molecular biology and virtual reality – and they’re pooling their expertise to create a system capable of simulating a tumour’s internal architecture.

The IMAXT team is part of Cancer Grand Challenges, a global funding initiative founded by Cancer Research UK and the US National Cancer Institute. It sets ambitious challenges so that diverse, global teams can come together and think differently, with the aim of making the progress against cancer the world urgently needs.

In 2017, the IMAXT team secured £20m of funding over five years, after impressing the Cancer Grand Challenges’ panel of eminent scientists with their proposal to create 3D maps of tumours.

The team, like many scientists involved in the fight against cancer, is working on ways to find the disease sooner and stop it from spreading or returning after it’s been treated. But to fund more bold ideas like IMAXT Cancer Research UK needs your help and one way that you can do that is by leaving a gift in your Will.

Gifts in Wills fund a third of Cancer Research UK’s life-saving research. Thanks to its generous supporters, the charity is the largest independent funder of cancer research in the world and the only one researching over 200 types of the disease. Cancer Research UK aims to prevent more cancers, diagnose them earlier, develop the best treatments and ensure that each patient receives the treatment that’s right for them. Your pledge will help Cancer Research UK, and the scientists it funds, achieve these goals so that future generations won’t have to fear cancer.