Our collaborators working on the IMAXT CRUK Cancer Grand Challenge project have released a new video!
Read more about the project and our team here with an excerpt below!
The world’s first virtual reality map of cancer
By developing an entirely new way to study cancer, IMAXT could revolutionise the diagnosis and treatment of people with the disease.
Tumour biopsies play a crucial role in a patient’s cancer journey, providing vital information on faulty genes to guide their diagnosis and support decisions around treatment.
But to fully understand cancer, we need to know everything about a tumour: what types of cells are in it, how many there are, what they are doing and exactly where they are located. Biopsies are very useful but current technologies used in the lab look at the sample or cells individually, rather than in the context of the surrounding environment. This provides researchers vital information about the separate components of a tumour, but the detailed overview of how the cells interact is missing.
A detailed, 3D picture of a tumour would enable doctors and scientists to develop new ways to diagnose and treat the disease, stopping it from spreading and coming back.
Tackling this challenge is IMAXT: a global team of experts from fields as diverse as medicine and astronomy, programming and molecular biology, and virtual reality (VR) and statistics. By combining existing techniques with entirely new approaches, IMAXT aims to build the first computerised 3D tumour that can be viewed in VR.