Welcome to the 5th CRC Network Meeting

Andrew Beggs

University of Birmingham

Andrew Beggs is a Professor of Cancer Genetics & Surgery in the Institute of Cancer and Genomic Sciences, University of Birmingham. He is also the Deputy Director of the Birmingham Experimental Cancer Medicine Centre, and holds a MRC Senior Clinical Fellowship and is a Fellow of the Alan Turing Institute. He is scientific lead for the FOXTROT, STAR-TREC, ARIEL and DETERMINE studies and provides genomics expertise for the national SMPEDS2 program.

Tamsyn Clark

University of Oxford

Dr Clark is a registrar in General Surgery with an interest in optimising drug delivery to hepatobiliary cancers. She was a CRUK Clinical Research Fellow during her recently awarded DPhil using ex vivo, perfused, clearance organs to predict human pharmacokinetics. She has been awarded national prizes for preclinical work on liver chemoperfusion supervised by Professors Peter Friend and Constantin Coussios.

Vegar Dagenborg

Oslo University Hospital

Vegar J Dagenborg is a consultant colorectal surgeon at the National Centre for Cytoreductive Surgery and HIPEC for peritoneal malignancies at the Norwegian Radium Hospital, Oslo University Hospital. The main clinical activities involve the management of locally advanced rectal cancers and metastatic colorectal cancer, particularly peritoneal metastases.

With a PhD in tumour biology and immunology of colorectal cancer and liver metastases, his current research projects involve exploring the tumour biology and immunology of peritoneal metastases. Vegar is an investigator in the NIPEC-OXA trial, a phase I study exploring the use of normothermic intraperitoneal Oxaliplatin as extended adjuvant treatment after cytoreductive surgery and HIPEC. Through the FLORENCE project, Vegar is also working on developing prediction models for patients with colorectal cancer by using machine-learning models.

Håvard E.G. Danielsen

Oslo University Hospital and University of Oxford

Professor Danielsen has taken on the task of leading the CRC Network. He is Director of the Institute for Cancer Genetics and Informatics (ICGI) at Oslo University Hospital (Norway) and, for the last 15 years, also professor II at the Department of Informatics, University of Oslo. He has been awarded several Honorary Professorships and prizes for his work on artificial intelligence and prognostic markers, among them Visiting Professor in Cancer Informatics at the Nuffield Division of Clinical Laboratory Sciences at the University of Oxford. His research focuses primarily on DNA- and chromatin organization and biomarkers, using informatics as a tool to study genetic changes in cancer.

Trevor Graham

The Institute of Cancer Research, London

Professor Graham, FMedSci is Director of the Centre for Evolution and Cancer at the Institute of Cancer Research in London, UK. His interdisciplinary research combines mathematical theory with molecular genomics and histopathology to study the evolution of human cancers, and translate this knowledge for improved cancer early detection, prognostication and treatment. He has a long-standing particular interest in intestine homeostasis and colon cancer evolution.

His talk will be held Thursday morning

Arne van Hoeck

Hartwig Medical Foundation

Arne is a senior post-doctoral fellow at UMC Utrecht, specializing in computational biology. He obtained his degree in biology from KU Leuven in Belgium. During his PhD studies at the University of Antwerp, he developed an interest in genomic and transcriptomic data analysis, which led him gradually move away from wet-lab work to a dry-lab environment. Arne's current research at UMC Utrecht in the lab of Edwin Cuppen focuses on cancer genomics analysis as he works on several whole-genome sequencing projects aimed at understanding the mutation landscapes in both healthy and cancerous tissues. He was also involved in developing genome-wide mutational classifiers for improved cancer diagnostics (CHORD, CUPLR).

Robert Jones

University of Liverpool

Mr Robert Jones is a Consultant Hepatobiliary Surgeon and Associate Professor of Surgery based at Liverpool University Hospitals. He has a specialist research interest in advanced and metastatic colorectal cancer, and is chief investigator for a number of clinical and translational studies including a novel cancer vaccine trial in collaboration with Biontech. He is the Royal College of Surgeons & Bowel Cancer UK Surgical Specialty Research Lead for advanced colorectal cancer.

David Kerr

University of Oxford

David contributes to Oxford as a Professor of Cancer Medicine, and has an international reputation for the treatment of, and research into colorectal cancer and the quality of his work has been recognised by the award of several international prizes. One of them was the first NHS Nye-Bevan award for innovation. He has published over 400 papers with an H-Index of 107 associated with over 54500 citations. David has made a significant contribution to reforming the NHS and cancer control in many countries around the world.

Andreas Kleppe

Oslo University Hospital and University of Oxford

Dr Kleppeis Senior Researcher at the Institute for Cancer Genetics and Informatics at Oslo University Hospital and Associate Professor at the Department of Informatics at the Uni­versity of Oslo. He has been working continuously with applying machine learning to medical images since his MSc project more than 10 years ago, which has ­contributed to commercialised prognostic markers for automatic detec­tion of ­hetero­geneous chromatin organisation across different ­cancer types and prediction of patient outcome using routine histopathological section images. With the aim of developing tools to assist healthcare providers to give the most appropriate treatment to each cancer patient, Dr Kleppe has a particular interest in developing machine learning markers robust enough to be employed in routine clinical practice. .

Yoshiaki Nakamura

Department of Gastrointestinal Oncology, National Cancer Center Hospital East

Dr Nakamura is now a Chief in International Research Promotion Office / Translational Research Support Section / Department of Gastroenterology and Gastrointestinal Oncology. He is currently involved in several projects, mainly in SCRUM-Japan and CIRCULATE-Japan, where he serves as principal investigator or sub-principal investigator for research related to liquid biopsy. He is also conducting some investigator-initiated clinical trials for rare subtype.

His talk will be held Thursday afternoon

Jens Rittscher

University of Oxford

Jens Rittscher is Professor of Engineering Science at the University of Oxford with his appointment held jointly between the Institute of Biomedical Engineering and the Nuffield Department of Medicine. He is a group leader at the Big Data Institute and is affiliated with the Ludwig Institute of Cancer Research and the Wellcome Centre as an adjunct member. Previously, he was a senior research scientist and manager at GE Global Research (Niskayuna, NY, USA). His research interests lie in enabling biomedical imaging through the development of new algorithms and novel computational platforms, with a current focus to improve mechanistic understanding of cancer and patient care through quantitative analysis of image data. He is a co-director of the Oxford EPSRC Centre for Doctoral Training in Health Data Science.

Presently, he serves on the executive committee of the Medical Image Analysis and the editorial board of Biological Imaging.

His talk will be held Thursday afternoon

Jeffrey Rubasingham

University of Oxford

Dr Jeffrey Rubasingham is a clinical oncologist and research fellow for the NIHR funded, first-in -human trial on Cavitation Enhanced Drug Delivery (CEeDD) in patients with metastatic colorectal cancer, led by Professors Rachel Kerr (Department of Oncology, University of Oxford) and Constantin Coussios (Institute of Biomedical Engineering, University of Oxford). He is currently reading for a DPhil in Engineering Science at the University of Oxford, focussing his research on the enhancement of antibody therapy in cancer patients by ultrasound-mediated cavitation.

His talk will be held Thursday morning

Colin Steele

University of Glasgow, CRUK Beatson Institute

Dr Steele is a colorectal surgeon and scientist working between Glasgow Royal infirmary and CRUK Beatson Institute. He has a clinical interest in locally advanced colorectal cancer and I recently obtained a UKRI FLF to investigate the role of neutrophils in metastatic progression in colorectal cancer and has been using spatial biological approaches and murine models to investigate the development and regulation of the metastatic niche.

His talk will be held Friday morning

Harald Stenmark

Oslo University Hospital

Professor Stenmark is professor at University of Oslo, where he is director of a Norwegian Centre of Excellence, Centre for Cancer Cell Reprogramming. He is also Head of Department of Molecular Cell Biology at Institute for Cancer Research, Oslo University Hospital. Stenmark obtained his PhD degree in cell biology at University of Oslo in 1991, and has since held various research positions at University of Oslo and Oslo University Hospital. He is elected member of European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO), European Academy of Cancer Sciences (ACS), and the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters, has published 280 papers, and they hav been cited over 43,000 times. His H-index is 97 (according to Web of Science).

His talk will be held Friday morning

Ian Tomlinson

University of Oxford

Ian is Professor of Cancer Genetics at the University of Oxford. His main research interest is colorectal cancer genetics, but he also works on endometrial cancer and broader aspects of cancer evolution.