A national rapid research autopsy network for end-stage cancer
When patients who agreed in advance die of cancer, sampling every tumour within hours reveals how the disease evolved and escaped every drug. Few hospitals can do this today.
Programmes such as PEACE (UK) and CASCADE (Australia) recruit patients in life for post-mortem multi-site sampling within six hours. The proposal is to fund a standing network with 24-hour on-call pathology, consent embedded in oncology clinics, and a common sample and data model, so that terminal clonal architecture becomes a routine, shareable dataset rather than a rarity.
- Tumour heterogeneity and clonal evolution · A tumour is many tumours. Treatments that kill most cells leave the rest to grow back, changed.
- Metastasis is understood least and studied last · Metastasis causes about nine in ten cancer deaths but gets a small fraction of research money and almost no trials of its own.
Pages like this
not linked directly; found by shared links- IdeaPool every multi-sample tumour genome into one open evolution atlas
Shares The Francis Crick Institute, Tumour heterogeneity and clonal evolution, Whole-exome & whole-genome sequencing, Cancer Research UK.
- IdeaBank three spatially separate tumour blocks from every resection
Shares The Francis Crick Institute, Tumour heterogeneity and clonal evolution, Whole-exome & whole-genome sequencing, Cancer Research UK.
- InstitutionWellcome
Shares The Francis Crick Institute, Single-cell & spatial profiling, Whole-exome & whole-genome sequencing, Cancer Research UK.
- InstitutionThe Mark Foundation for Cancer Research
Shares The Francis Crick Institute, Metastasis is understood least and studied last, Cancer Research UK.
- Key paperGerlinger: a single biopsy misses most of the mutations in a kidney tumour
Shares The Francis Crick Institute, Tumour heterogeneity and clonal evolution, Whole-exome & whole-genome sequencing, Cancer Research UK.
- Key paperTRACERx 421: the full-cohort picture of how lung cancer evolves and which subclones drive relapse
Shares The Francis Crick Institute, Tumour heterogeneity and clonal evolution, Metastasis is understood least and studied last, Whole-exome & whole-genome sequencing.
- CompanyValius Sciences
Shares Single-cell & spatial profiling, Whole-exome & whole-genome sequencing.
- IdeaRing-fence a fifth of national cancer research money for metastasis
Shares Metastasis is understood least and studied last, Cancer Research UK.