Science Talk

With our Science Talk blog, we hope to lift the lid on the black box that is the ICR: to show you inside our labs, to introduce you to a few of the people here who make the discoveries, and to allow them to tell some of the stories behind the science. We try to put our discoveries in a wider scientific context, and give an idea of how our science is actually done. We also give you the view from the ICR of important developments in the wider world of cancer research.

02/12/14 - by

It's been another brilliant year of science here at The Institute of Cancer Research - and selecting our top 10 advances was not an easy job

Each autumn I have the fascinating job of sorting through all of our research papers as part of the process of selecting the 10 most exciting discoveries of the year.

I don't do the choosing - that's the job of our Research Directorate - but I do have to consult with our Heads of Division and apply a set of criteria on research quality and impact in order to kick off the discussion with a long list of possibles.

There are more than 700 research papers published each year which have an author from the ICR so it's not an easy task to sort through them all and begin to pull together a list of studies that could at least be considered for the final 10.

But it's actually one of my favourite jobs, because it gives me the chance to look through the breadth of the research that we do here at the ICR, and to spend some time appreciating the exciting progress we have made over the course of the year.

This year the ICR will be announcing the 10 papers that made the final list over the first two weeks of December, as an ICR research advent calendar! Each day we’ll bring you a new discovery, looking at what we found, and what the impact of this research could be for cancer patients.

So keep an eye on our website as we reveal our most exciting achievements of the year. Our highlights include clinical trial results that we hope will change clinical practice, research revealing the structure of key proteins in cancer development, the discovery of a genetic link between two apparently unrelated diseases, and potential new ways to prevent cancer cells from spreading or to identify the patients most likely to respond to certain treatments.

We have started this week with research which discovered that the prostate cancer drug enzalutamide improves patient survival in men with prostate cancer before chemotherapy, and a discovery that revealed the structure of one of the most important and complicated proteins in cell division and cancer, which you can read about here.

We hope you’ll come back and see what we announce over the next few weeks.