Any. I've known Vincent for many, many years, and if he recalls, I think I do as I examine these Ph.D theses in Newcastle.
So Vincent graduated from Newcastle initially, then became a clinical training fellow.
See our UK to do his the film. After his DPhil, he became a clinical lecturer at Newcastle 2003 and became,
I believe, the first see our UK clinician scientist that was given to a surgeon.
Then he joined Cambridge and became honorary consultant and has been leading a group now on prostate cancer research.
He's got, uh, many publications to his credit, and he's got a number of very interesting projects that he has been leading.
And his research is really very grounded, going from genetics through to having clinical applications of risk calculators that he will talk to us.
And this is a powerful instrument, I believe, which has a lot of a lot of mileage.
So your colleagues also the CIA, Cambridge Cancer Centre on neurological cancers and a group on translational research and the Clinical Trials Office.
So without delaying you further, Vincent, warm welcome.
Thank you very much for coming. Thank you, Freddie, it's a great honour to be invited because not only did you examine my Ph.D.,
you were also a senior lecturer at the time when I was a humble, asexual and didn't speak to you.
So I think I've achieved something to get here today. So thank you very much for the kind of invite.
And what I want to talk to you about today is actually a research journey as much as the things we've developed,
because when I started off in this area,
I was led very much by what I was told needs to be done and very quickly got to the point where I question what needed to be done.
And now the question is what should we be doing? So I'll first of give you some context as to where I work and what I do.
As you said, I started off in Newcastle and then got pulled into the Dragon's Den of Cambridge.
And Herbie Newell, who was up in Newcastle,
told me to be very careful when I went there because it's full of people who are you looking up to stab you in the back?
It's not as bad as that, but actually it is a very challenging environment and you really need to know your stuff, which actually is a good thing.
These are the organisations that I, if you like, lead and we've developed over the last five years,
obviously, we are lucky to have a big programme of academic urology trainees and the academic urology group.
We have set up the Cambridge Urology Translational and Clinical Trials Office,
which is in these humble buildings up there, and we've got a fabulous team of people who work together.
And I also happen to co-lead the CEO UK um, urological malignancies programme with Professor Eamon Maher,
which is a very large, UK funded infrastructure for all kinds of research.
More important than that is I'm very privileged to work together with some amazing colleagues,
and one of the key insights that I can ever gain have ever gained and can ever impart is it is of no value to be
personally successful because it only success makes success for you and your impact when you reach is very limited.
Instead, we've been able to work with a whole bunch of colleagues here in academic oncology, clinical oncology to basic sciences, engineering,
radiology, pathology and also our clinical colleagues as well all centred around an infrastructure which has been very successful.
We've had pretty good, you know, research income and many more papers published.
And this is the resource which I am very fortunate to work with them to be able to deliver what we do.
We also have this. Now this is a bioethics called diamond,
which is actually one of the most powerful ethics around to be able to do studies because we can flex it to do nearly everything.
We have over two and a half thousand men in diamond. We have got imaging, we've got guided biopsies.
We can get them involved in ICM trials. We can do get all your samples for all kinds of collections,
and we've used it for a number of applications and also for redefining prognostic categories at the moment.
This continues to recruit for bespoke studies, but is a resource which is highly annotated to answer any question we have and indeed
allows us to actually undertake both multi-center trials and also translational research.
We have led a number of national studies, these are just some of the ones we've just completed, working with many different sites,
looking around neoadjuvant studies, a new device for prostate biopsies we've developed to predict prostate to or talk about.
And the five study, which I'll explain a little bit more about, which integrates biomarkers in imaging.
And these connexions has allowed us to explore how we take ideas generated from Cambridge and work with other centres.
So to be clear, this is not studies that are coming from commercial companies or other bodies.
These are things that we have actually originated.
So I put this up to remind me of if you like, where I started, so back in the day when I was looking at my Ph.D.,
I was particularly interested in this molecule called SCEF, because that was what the lab did in Newcastle.
They were into molecular biology and FGF signalling fabulous growth factors.
And I quickly identified that this molecule seemed to be very important in FGF regulation and had a profound effect in altering biology.
And this was relevant because growth factor signalling in FGF was the area of interest in prostate cancer.
And this led to a number of publications in lots of different journals, which was really nice for the science and actually advancing knowledge base.
But it quickly became apparent to me that I wasn't actually show where this was all heading, but it has been successful.
This is a slide which I think I might remember from A.N. Lecture some time ago,
and we were able to show through many publications that the FGF signalling axis was altered at multiple different levels effectively.
If you looked at one thing that would not tell you the tale, so we showed that not only were ligands upregulated, the receptors were upregulated.
And more importantly, there was a whole layer of regulation of these signalling pathways, which are also upregulated or downregulated.
So in effect, if you were to design something to target this bit, these other things would compensate.
And it actually turns out that this was a very important lesson in hindsight, because nothing sits on its own.
And therefore we're only looking at one part of things and you forget something else and you spend lots
and lots of money developing a drug war that you will probably fail because the tumours can adapt.
And in fact, people can adapt funny.
So really, at the end of all of this was this question of what was the relevance of the work that I, as a urologist,
as a as a urological surgeon and interest in prostate cancer was achieving by doing molecular biology at this level?
Don't get me wrong, it was important work to be done, but a value added wasn't very clear to me.
And then there was another piece of work,
which I did because I was trying to think along these lines as to what is it we were actually doing in the labs and what we were looking for,
particularly around biomarkers. Because as a urologist, I was entirely focussed on radical prostatectomy, surgical removal of the prostate gland.
And that was what we were looking for. Biomarkers relapse after that. So this was a piece of work which.