BioSpec
BioSpec
My research interests are to develop novel approaches for clinical diagnosis and prognosis of cancers (breast, colon, oesophagus, head and neck, skin) and other molecular diseases (Alzheimer’s disease). For this, I am working at the forefront of cross disciplines by combining novel spectroscopic, molecular imaging technologies and machine learning approaches (conventional and High Power Computing) with clinical practices of histopathology, immunohistochemistry, etc, to investigate molecular changes in cells, tissue and biofluids.
I am a Research Fellow in the £20M multinational Cancer Grand Challenge ‘PRECISION’ (https://www.dcisprecision.org/) project funded by the CRUK in which my main aim is to identify prognostic biomarkers of ductal carcinoma insitu (DCIS), which is a precursor to invasive breast cancer. Currently, it is not known as to which women diagnosed with DCIS develop an invasive breast cancer and which women remain with DCIS without developing an invasive cancer. Because of this uncertain progression, all women diagnosed with DCIS are given a treatment (surgery, radiation therapy and chemotherapy) which in most cases might not be needed. To avoid the unnecessary ‘overtreatment of DCIS’, I am specifically investigating the molecular and physico-chemical features of breast tissue and breast microcalfications. On a large cohort of tissue samples, I am using a combination of vibrational spectroscopy imaging techniques, X-ray diffraction and novel data mining tools and corroborating imaging features to genetic data from the same patients to identify biomarkers of DCIS progression.
