Nitzan Rosenfeld receives Translational Research Award

Congratulations to Nitzan Rosenfeld, who has won the 2013 British Association for Cancer Research Translational Research Award.

The purpose of the award is to recognise and reward the achievements of an individual whose work has made significant contributions to translational (laboratory – clinic) cancer research.

The lab are working on developing effective methods to make use of circulating tumour DNA (ctDNA), which is found in blood and other body fluids and contains much useful information about a patient’s cancer. For example, by using genomic techniques to study ctDNA researchers can learn about the evolution of a patient’s tumour and how it is developing resistance to therapy. The advantage of using ctDNA to diagnose and monitor disease is that it can be collected relatively non-invasively, through a blood test rather than a tumour biopsy, and ease of sample collection means that you can take many more samples to follow the development and changes in a tumour.