EACR Roundtable: Pioneering in the unknown: how to navigate through the spatial biology

Nigel Jamieson is a Clinical Senior Lecturer within the Institute of Cancer Sciences and an Honorary HPB surgeon at Glasgow Royal Infirmary. He completed his undergraduate medical degree at the University of Glasgow when his interest in pancreatic cancer research began. He subsequently undertook a PhD funded by the Chief Scientist Office investigating gene expression signatures in pancreatic adenocarcinoma at the Beatson Institute. After completing his surgical training including observership periods at Johns Hopkins, Baltimore and Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, New York he undertook an international fellowship year of pancreas and liver surgery in Royal North Shore Hospital, Sydney, Australia where he gained significant experience in post-neoadjuvant therapy pancreatic resections. Grants from the Academy of Sciences and Pancreatic Cancer UK maintained his research output during his surgical training. He was recently awarded a Clinician Scientist Fellowship by Cancer Research UK and upon returning to Glasgow was awarded a Lord Kelvin and Adam Smith Leadership Fellowship from the University of Glasgow.

He has contributed to over 70 peer reviewed publications and with an active role in the development and management of the Precision-Panc platform, his primary research interest now focusses upon the interaction between the genomic landscape, the immune microenvironment and chemotherapy in patients with pancreatic cancer. Specifically, he will look to develop combination therapeutic strategies that target Immune evasion in pancreatic cancer.

Roderick Beijersbergen (PhD) is group leader at the Netherlands Cancer Institute, and professor Functional Genomics at the University of Amsterdam. His research focusses on the development and application of large-scale functional genomic technologies. His recent work uses advanced cell-based screening technologies allowing for the interrogation of spatial, dynamic and temporal phenotypes using high end microscopy. He is heading the NKI Robotics and Screening Center and the Genomics Core Facility in which high throughput screening, NGS, single cell and spatial transcriptomics. He is also part of the NKI virtual spatial omics core providing spatial analyses for both research and clinic.

I started my carrier at Texas A&M University learning about patterns in genes and proteins, allowing and facilitating subcellular protein trafficking.  As I have progressed to MD Anderson Cancer Center, I have scaled to cellular trafficking attempting to understand the spatial distribution of cells in organ systems during disease.  As in many parts of life, form equals functions.  How our cells organize speaks to how they function and respond to their local environment.  Bringing together multi-omics approaches allows for greater clarity in these imaging snapshots that are collected. 

Itay Tirosh obtained his PhD in computational biology at the lab of Naama Barkai, the Weizmann Institute of Science, Israel. From 2012 to 2017 he was a postdoctoral fellow at the Regev and Golub labs at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, and since August 2017 he has been a Senior Scientist back at the Weizmann Institute of Science. The Tirosh lab is combining computational approaches and experimental single cell methods to understand the diversity of cells within human tumors, with a focus on glioma and head & neck cancer.