Prof Catharine West PhD

Research interests

The challenge for radiotherapy-related research is to find ways of giving as much radiation as possible to kill cancer cells while minimising the doses received by surrounding healthy tissue. The expansion of our knowledge through the Human Genome Project has been accompanied by the development of new high-throughput techniques, which provide extensive capabilities for the analysis of a large number of genes or the whole genome. There is a belief that this genomic revolution, i.e. sequencing of the human genome and developments in high throughput technology, heralds a future of personalised medicine. For radiotherapy, this progress should increase the possibility of predicting individual patient response to radiotherapy. The Translational Radiobiology Group, therefore, is interested in the characterisation of molecular profiles that reflect relevant biological phenotypes and predict tumour and normal tissue response to radiation.