Mapping a route to success
This is Professor Greg Hannon. He’s pioneering a new method of investigating tumours by mapping them with virtual reality.
Professor Greg Hannon has four children, four goats, three dogs, 18 chickens and a cat. As well as looking after his family and animals, he’s also helping to fight cancer. Professor Hannon is leader of the Cancer Grand Challenges IMAXT team. IMAXT’s aim: to create 3D maps of tumours, which can be explored in virtual reality, to guide oncologists and people with cancer in treatment decisions.
“The programme was born out of my exposure a number of years ago to work done by neuroscientists at Cold Spring Harbour, in New York, particularly those looking at structures within the brain. This made me think that we could do the same thing in cancer biology to start to understand the 3D arrangement of cells in tumours,” says Professor Hannon.
In 2017, Professor Hannon and the global team of medics, biologists, engineers, programmers and astronomers behind IMAXT secured £20m funding after impressing the Cancer Grand Challenges panel of eminent scientists with their proposal to create virtual reality 3D maps of tumours. Since then, the IMAXT team has made remarkable progress, building completely new technologies that reveal important information about cancer biology and provide new clues about cancer prevention and treatment.
“Our programme relies on techniques that didn’t exist, so we built them,” says Professor Hannon. “People told us it would be impossible and yet here we are, using these new techniques.”
“Our initial goal is to have this as a research tool, to allow us to interrogate tumours in a way that was previously impossible. But we certainly see that this is potentially a very powerful tool for everyone to understand more about cancer, from university students to trainee doctors and most importantly patients. Our long-term goal is to see this used in some way in the clinic.”
Professor Hannon is certain that what he and the IMAXT team have achieved wouldn’t have been possible without Cancer Research UK and the help, such as Gifts in Wills, of its many generous supporters. Gifts in Wills fund a third of Cancer Research UK’s research. “This kind of huge global effort couldn’t happen without Cancer Research UK having the bravery to invest on that scale,” he says.
“I’m always saying that funding on this scale is a privilege, and that we should be using it to drive innovation and tackle cancer’s toughest challenges in new ways.”
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