Professor Josephine Bunch

Professor Josephine Bunch, based at the National Physical Laboratory (NPL) in London, is leading a Cancer Grand Challenges Programme to create detailed maps of tumours.

In collaboration with a team of physicists, chemists and biologists, their aim is to use these maps to better understand the inner workings of tumours and how they grow and survive. The team will use a variety of new imaging techniques to look at everything from the whole tumour right down to the individual fats and proteins in cells.

This work will start by looking at bowel, breast and pancreatic cancers, with the intention of applying this technology to a whole range of cancer types in future.

Professor Bunch hopes that the information from these maps will improve our overall understanding of cancer and lead to new ways to diagnose and treat the disease. You can read more about the research here.