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.

The Rosetta project

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We are very excited about the results that we are obtaining as a part of Rosetta consortium. Combining mass spectrometry imaging with our conventional approaches is allowing us to finally dissect the factors determining the breast cancer metabolic heterogeneity and specifically what role MYC plays in it. We are very much looking forward to seeing how the data from our pre-clinical models will translate into human breast cancer samples.

Dr Mariia Yuneva - Francis Crick Institute

Grand Challenge team

I'm very excited about the progress we have made. We now have data to suggest that the major mutation that occur in colorectal and pancreatic cancer drives metabolic signature that can be easily identified using image based mass spec approaches. This shows the power of this methodology to stratify cancers. Going forward I'm looking forward to seeing if we can see if we can use these approaches to predict therapeutic responses in these cancers.

Professor Owen Sansom - Beatson Institute