I’m Dr. Nicholas McGranahan. I'm based at the UCL Cancer Institute, and I run a computational lab focusing on cancer genomics. I think the major reason we're being recognised is our research in lung cancer. What we've realised is that, if we think of a tumour, we often think of it as a homogeneous mass. It's about a billion cells. But actually, when we look at all those different cells, we realise there's lots of variety and lots of heterogeneity within the tumour mass, and that means tumours ar
e incredibly hard to treat. What we are trying to do is use the diversity to ultimately reconstruct how an individual tumour has developed from that first tumour cell. We can look for patterns in this data. We can explore how, for instance, the patterns in a primary tumour, and different regions of a primary tumour, where there's certain parts that will metastasise. AI, I think, really brings a lot of opportunities to how we can use patterns within tumours to start to predict whether a tumour mi
ght come back and what are the features of certain tumour cells that ultimately might spread to other parts of the body, and then also predicting which patients might respond well to certain treatments. Tumours can effectively get an invisibility cloak, to allow them to escape the immune system, and we've developed various tools to allow us to look for whether or not they've got this invisibility cloak. That allows us to also perhaps understand how we could harness that for new treatment. It was
absolutely amazing to be recognised by the Blavatnik Awards committee. I've seen also the various people that have been recognised in the past and to be sort of considered among them is absolutely fantastic. My advice to young scientists would really be to try - try it out. There's lots of publicly available data, and there's lots of questions you can start asking. I think you can read about it, which is exciting, but actually doing really is what makes a difference and at least gets me excited
about it. I've tried to, as much as I can, to help support my group, to allow them to grow as scientists. Ultimately, you know, we're only here researching for a relatively short period of time to leave a mark. Ultimately, it won't really be in the little bit we do; it'll be in how we help others and allow them to do incredible research.
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