Congratulations to a Cambridge team led by Matthew Murray (Cambridge University Hospitals and Co-Lead of our Children, Teenage and Young Adult Cancers Programme) who have been awarded funding from the British Neuropathological Society to improve the speed and accuracy of brain tumour diagnosis for children and adults in the East of England. The project is a collaboration between the Departments of Neuropathology (Lina Carmona, Kieren Allinson and Mayen Briggs), Neurosurgery (Thomas Santarius), and Paediatric Haematology and Oncology (Matthew Murray) at Cambridge University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, and the Cancer Molecular Diagnostics Laboratory (Shuhba Anand) at the Cancer Research UK Cambridge Centre. The new approach would allow detailed molecular data on the brain tumour to be obtained within a few hours, alongside the frozen section information, to give the most rapid and accurate diagnosis back to the neurosurgeon, to inform the ongoing operation. This is a huge step forward as currently detailed routine molecular data, including methylation and whole genome sequencing, typically takes 3-4 weeks to be returned to the clinical team.
This project is supported by CMDL’s recent successful ISO 15189 clinical accreditation status and is such a fantastic success story as it is a mark of how all the hard work to achieve the accreditation is already resulting in impact for patients.
