Building a 'Google Earth' of cancer

Funded through Cancer Research UK's Grand Challenge scheme, NPL's Professor Josephine Bunch leads a group of international and multidisciplinary chemists, physicists and biologists from the UK to develop a reproducible, standardised way to fully map tumours with extraordinary precision.

Now at the end of its first year, this ground-breaking project has progressed with impressive speed and achieved some remarkable results. These advancements are set to transform our understanding of cancer and open the door to new and better ways to diagnose and treat the disease.

The world's first 'Rosetta Stone' of cancer cell metabolism

In the same way cartographers build maps of cities and countries to help people get around, scientists build maps of tumours to better understand their inner workings. But despite significant advances in technology and our understanding of cancer, our tumour maps remain incomplete. What's missing is our ability to see down to the very core of cancer cells and understand how changes in their metabolism can impact their overall state and function within a tumour. No one has ever mapped tumours in this level of detail before – until now.

The 'Rosetta' team are focusing on breast, bowel and pancreatic tumours, as well as investigating an aggressive type of brain tumour. They are working to capture changes to these metabolites as tumours develop or respond to treatments while simultaneously recording information about the cell's exact location within the tumour.

Superimposing these data with maps revealing information about the underlying genetics of these cells will produce the world's first 'Rosetta Stone' of cancer cell metabolism – a high-resolution metabolic map that offers unprecedented insight into a cell's biochemical state. This cutting-edge approach is generating vast amounts of data, which will be made freely available to the research community, providing a Google Earth-type view of a tumour, on a scale that we have never known before.

Thanks to Grand Challenge, we've been able to build a collective force of physicists, chemists and biologists – all coming together for the first time to map cancer in unprecedented detail. Our goal is to find out how tumours survive and why they keep growing. By applying our powerful analysis techniques to this problem, we want to gain new insight into these fundamental processes and develop new and better ways to diagnose and treat cancer

Dr Josephine Bunch - Lead Investigator, NPL

Grand Challenge team

The team uses a variety of new mass spectrometry imaging techniques and instruments they've developed to study individual breast, bowel and pancreatic tumours; the cancers where they believe they can make the biggest difference, fastest.

From the whole tumour right down to the individual fats and proteins in cells (the metabolites), to the tumour microenvironment, they will map and visualise every bit of these tumours to create faithful 3D representations of them for the first time.

By doing this, they aim to create the equivalent of a 'Google Earth' that will allow you not only to identify a house and where it is in a country, but also who's inside, what they're eating and watching on TV.

By creating such detailed representations of these tumours, our understanding of cancer will improve and we will be able to identify new and better ways to diagnose and treat the disease.

The team will also create a database containing their data which will be available to researchers around the globe, and strive to create a standardised way for other scientists and doctors to use these new techniques in their work and in the clinic to help them look at other cancers in the same way and speed up progress against the disease.