Attending the Maastricht Pathology 2018 Conference

By Ana Sredic-Rhodes, PhD Student

I recently spent four days in Maastricht at the joint Meeting of the British Division of the International Academy of Pathology and the Pathological Society of Great Britain & Ireland, where I presented work I have been doing using data from the MRC CR07 clinical trial. The title of my talk was: The Impact of Short Course Pre-Operative Radiotherapy on Tumour Cell Density and Tumour Biology in Rectal Cancer.

My presentation discussed how in the sample of patients from the trial that I used, pre-operative radiotherapy significantly reduced both the tumour cell density (a tumour can also contain other types of cells) and the amount of the tumour genome that is either duplicated or deleted. Both of these measures have been shown to be associated with recurrence of rectal cancer, therefore the reduction in these after radiotherapy could explain why pre-operative radiotherapy was associated with a lower amount of recurrence in the trial; I also explained the next steps of my work which are to evaluate the potential impact of the measures on patient survival.

My talk formed part of the Early Colorectal Cancer Symposium, however I also attended many other symposia that were relevant to my project, such as the Genotype or Phenotype – What Matters Most in Gastrointestinal Cancers? Symposium and one on Molecular Pathological Epidemiology (MPE): Integrative Big-Data/ Population-Pathobiology.  It was incredibly useful to learn about how others have conducted similar studies to what I plan to do. I also met with other researchers to discuss future collaboration and to validate the results using their cohort of patients and vice versa. Overall, although I was initially nervous presenting for the first time at a European conference, it was a really valuable experience!