Please join us online on Thursday 16th March, from 15.00-16.00

Dear Colleagues,

 

In this series of webinars brought to you by the Cancer Research UK Convergence Science Centre at Imperial College London and The Institute of Cancer Research, London, researchers across the two organisations will discuss key challenges facing cancer research and opportunities for new convergence science approaches to address these. Join us to consider how novel approaches and technologies could shed light on unresolved problems in cancer biology, to innovate new ways to address challenges in cancer and bring pioneering treatments to cancer patients faster.

 

The 16th March seminar will be hosted by Professor Alan Melcher. The series aims to support the Centre's mission to facilitate collaboration between traditionally separate and distinct disciplines.

 

Please join us online on Thursday 16th March, from 15.00-16.00, for talks from:

 

Chirine Sakr and Annie Baker - Genomics and Evolutionary Dynamics Team, Institute of Cancer Research, London

 

"Understanding tumour-immune co-evolution using highly multiplexed imaging"

 

Highly multiplexed imaging facilitates the parallel characterisation of immune and stromal cell populations together with the local tumour cell phenotype. In contrast to single cell sequencing (which is typically destructive of the tissue architecture), imaging-based approaches retain the native spatial structure and histopathological context. This allows for the quantification of epithelial-immune interactions and cellular neighbourhoods, and inference of which environments are promoting or constraining tumour progression.

 

In this talk, we will describe the generation and analysis of highly multiplexed imaging datasets in our lab. We will highlight how these data can provide new insight into tumour biology and evolution. Finally, we will introduce the Akoya Phenocycler and comment on how teams within the Convergence Science Centre can access this technology.

 

Dr Annie Baker is a Staff Scientist working in the Genomics and Evolutionary Dynamics Team at the Institute of Cancer Research (ICR). Annie received her undergraduate degree in Biochemistry from the University of Oxford, and her PhD from the ICR. She was a Postdoc and then a Senior Scientific Officer at Barts Cancer Institute, before moving back to the ICR in early 2022 with Prof Trevor Graham. Her research combines genomics, histology and molecular biology to understand the co-evolution of tumour cells and their microenvironment.

 

Chirine Sakr is a Higher Scientific Officer working in the Genomics and Evolutionary Dynamics Team at the ICR, and she is funded by the Convergence Science Centre. Chirine received her undergraduate degree in Biomedical Sciences from the University of Portsmouth, and her masters's degree from the University of Nottingham. She is an expert in generating multiplexed imaging data, and currently runs the Akoya Phenocycler-Fusion based in the Centre for Evolution and Cancer at the ICR.

 

 

Please note: This webinar is exclusively available to colleagues from the Institute of Cancer Research, the Royal Marsden, Imperial and Imperial College Healthcare. Do not forward to colleagues outside of these organisations.