In 2024, our TOUR team was nominated  for the Collaborative Research Excellence award in the Research category of the annual Faculty of Life Sciences & Medicine Staff Awards at King’s College London.

“A beacon of excellence for clinical and translational research, the TOUR team continues to go from strength to strength, providing invaluable research and translation across King’s Health Partners, and is core to the innovative Guy’s Cancer Real World Evidence Programme. Over the past year, this multi-disciplinary team of largely early career researchers has grown and sustained a very wide range of high-quality research activities focussed on improving the care of cancer patients locally and internationally. Their work spans a broad range of clinical fields, from pre-doctoral fellowships for nurses and physiotherapists to database support for various cancer studies and other medical conditions. The team is a huge asset to the Faculty.”

Following this nomination, we reviewed all our activities and decided to rebrand as to reflect all of these amazing research efforts with patients at the centre of everything we do. We are proud to announce that going forward TOUR stands for: Transforming cancer OUtcomes through Research.

The TOUR team aims to use science to improve healthcare outcomes by translating oncology research into clinical practice. TOUR is led by Professor Mieke Van Hemelrijck, and comprises a team of quantitative and qualitative researchers, clinicians, students, research nurses, trial coordinators, and database managers who are active across the field of translational oncology research.

The translational research work of the group encompasses a heterogeneous set of activities with clinical cancer epidemiology at the core. Their unique multidisciplinary expertise and collaborations provide a methodology for researching prevention, early diagnosis and detection, treatment outcomes, and living with and beyond cancer. Their work demonstrates the role of clinical epidemiology across the entire cancer patient pathway.

Prof Van Hemelrijck is supported in her leadership by Senior Research Fellows, with diverse expertise:

• Louis Fox: Quality of Life Research Lead
• Gincy George: Senior Epidemiologist – Real World Evidence Partnerships Lead
• Saran Green: Patient and Public Involvement/Engagement Lead
• Anna Haire: Senior Study Coordinator – Bladder Cancer Lead
• Charlotte Moss: PROMs and Clinical Database Management Lead
• Beth Russell: Senior Epidemiologist – Real World Evidence Lead
• Harriet Wylie: Senior Study Coordinator – Prostate Cancer Lead

Moreover, Prof Van Hemelrijck leads Guy’s Cancer Real World Evidence (RWE) Programme together with Dr Anne Rigg from Guy’s and St Thomas’ NHS Foundation Trust. The programme aims to amplify Guy’s Cancer RWE data science capability and facilitate addressing answering challenging cancer research questions. The overall aim of Guy’s Cancer RWE Programme is to drive world class patient centred research.

The TOUR team is also part of the Centre for Cancer, Society, and Public Health, which includes other research groups and jointly focuses on research related to the control of risk-factors and the prevention of cancer, the early diagnosis and detection of cancer and pre-cancer, patients’ experiences of treatment and care and inequalities in their prognosis, treatment, and survival.

More news on our recent achievements and activities can be found on our Twitter page as well as within the sections on Projects, Activities, and Education below.

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Short Course in collaboration with the Karolinska Institute:

Clinical Cancer Epidemiology: From Prevention to Treatment and Patient Care.

Since the Covid-19 pandemic, epidemiology has become a much better known discipline. However, in clinical cancer research, we need epidemiology throughout the entire patient pathway.

The course will introduce the importance of clinical cancer epidemiology while keeping the clinical impact of the discipline at the centre.There will be clinical guest lectures highlighting how clinical epidemiological methodology has led to studies of important clinical impact for people with cancer as well as discussions on different components of clinical epidemiology and how they interact with various other disciplines. There will also be opportunities to present your research ideas and get feedback from experts in the field.

Course dates

• Friday June 14th 2024 (hybrid meeting at Karolinska Institute)
• Thursday September 5th 2024 - virtual meeting
• Tuesday October 15th 2024 - virtual meeting
• Tuesday November 5th 2024 - virtual meeting
• Thursday December 5th 2024 (hybrid meeting at King’s College London)

Note: Time zone is UK.

For full details of this course, please visit the course page.

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National and international collaborations:

The TOUR team is part of a diverse set of collaborative research initiatives, of which a few are listed below:

Prostate Cancer

• PIONEER – European Network of Excellence for Big Data in Prostate Cancer
• ReIMAGINE – Correcting 40 years of risk stratification error in Prosate Cancer
• GAP3 Consortium – Active Surveillance for Prostate Cancer
• Stockholm 0 – Collaboration with the Karolinska Institute on Drug Repurposing for Prostate Cancer
• Movember GAP4 INTERVAL trial – Exercise intervention for prostate cancer
• Movember IRONMAN – International Registry of men with metastatic prostate cancer
• PCASTT

Bladder Cancer

• BC-RECON - Diagnosing Bladder Cancer- evaluating the role of a urinary biomarker test in the Reconfiguration of the haematuria clinic investigations.
• Annual Bladder Cancer Translational Research Conference in the UK

Kidney Cancer

• TracerX – Trial to define drivers and intratumour heterogeneity in renal cell carcinoma and determine the relationship between heterogeneity and disease stage, clinical outcome and treatment response.

Other Cancers

• AMORIS – Collaboration with the Karolinska Institute to investigate the role of a diverse set of biomarkers in risk and development of different types of cancer.
• Implementation of Patient Reported Outcome Measures