Research overview

Professor Simon Robinson, Pre-Clinical MRI

Located in the Centre for Cancer Imaging, the Robinson laboratory is a multidisciplinary group focussing on the application of both established and innovative, quantitative functional MRI techniques to identify case-specific imaging biomarkers in subcutaneous, orthotopic, transgenic and patient-derived xenograft models of cancer in vivo, thereby establishing their utility to correctly inform on i) the pathology and processes relevant to a particular cancer type, and ii) response/resistance to treatment against these processes.

Exploiting our combined expertise, we have been responsible for the pre-clinical evaluation of numerous functional MRI methods/biomarkers that have been successfully translated and proved informative when translated into aligned clinical imaging investigations of cancer patients. We have also demonstrated how pre-clinical imaging can accelerate the development of promising new treatments, or force early closure of a project which ultimately may not deliver a useful/safe drug.