Precision Diagnostics

Scientific Overview

Projects within this research area employ advances in imaging and molecular profiling, including genomics, transcriptomics, proteomics and metabolomics, to enable precision diagnostics for oncology.

The aim of this research is the development of new diagnostic methods so that clinicians can more accurately understand, at the point of diagnosis, how a specific patient's disease is likely to progress, and how it will respond to treatments. Projects within this research area span the continuum from early-stage research all the way to commercial tests that can stratify cancer patients into treatment groups based on personal molecular markers.

These markers are often ensembles (or “signatures”) of molecules rather than single entities. As such, their prognostic and predictive power can be substantially enhanced by applying computational modelling approaches, an area of expertise within POI. These methods can consider personal context and produce highly individualised prognostic and predictive models, to more accurately predict recurrence risk or treatment response.

Lay Overview

This area of research focuses on developing more accurate or ‘precision’ diagnostics for cancer. By ‘precision’ diagnostics, we mean tests that take into account individual variability in genes, molecular building blocks, and other clinical factors, when assessing a patient’s cancer. POI also applies computational modelling to develop more accurate diagnostic tests.

Precision diagnostics being developed within this research area include tests to allow earlier cancer detection using non-invasive methods such as blood sampling, tests to estimate how likely a patient’s tumour is to recur, tests to predict in advance which treatments a patient is most likely to respond well to, and tests for monitoring disease progression and treatment response.