Date: Tuesday 25th March
Time: 6 - 8pm
Venue: St John's College Old Divinity School, Main Lecture Theatre, All Saints Passage, CB2 1TP
FREE registration: https://camfest25-investigating-cancer.eventbrite.co.uk
As part of the Cambridge Festival 2025, two multidisciplinary research group leaders from the Early Cancer Institute, with different research backgrounds, will outline their work towards our mission to 'move the world beyond fear of cancer.'
In these back-to-back talks, you will hear about research that explores how cancers originate and how cancer is often associated with aging.
Expect lots of interaction between the two researchers as they explain their work in lay terms and discuss how their research translates to real life by contributing to the development of new technologies, treatments and practices.
There will be plenty of opportunities for audience members to ask questions.
THE TALKS:
Professor Jamie Blundell
Predicting and preventing a future cancer: how evolution, genomics, and maths can tell us about early warning signs of cancers decades before they are diagnosed
Earlier detection of cancers is a major goal for the NHS and CRUK to improve clinical outcomes. This talk will address the following questions: what is the earliest point you could detect cancers? Can you predict future cancer? Can you intervene to stop cancer before it develops?
Cancer is a process of Darwinian evolution playing out in the cells that make up our tissues. This talk will show how concepts from Darwinian evolution (e.g. survival of the fittest ) can be applied to understand the how cancers develop, spot the earliest signs of a future cancer, and, point us towards strategies to stop it developing in the first place. You will learn about the new world of early cancer detection and prevention, about state-of-the-art genetic technologies and about the mathematics of evolution.
Dr Daniel Muñoz Espín
Ageing and Interventions for Rejuvenation
Human beings have known for thousands of years that ageing anticipates our death. That's why many different cultures throughout history have searched the eternal youth by the Elixir of Life (also known as Elixir of Immortality), the Holy Grail, or the Fountain of Youth. Ageing is featured by a progressive and generalised decline of the structure and function of our tissues and organs, and this results in a growing risk of multiple age-related diseases that, ultimately, will compromise our wellbeing and cause our death. But, what are the triggers of ageing? Is ageing inevitable? Are there lifestyle habits and therapeutic interventions to prevent ageing?
The World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that the number of people in the world aged over 60 years will double from ~1 billion to 2.1 billion by 2050. The significant increase in a global ageing population will result in a rise in age-related diseases causing a strong socioeconomic impact. This leads us to ask a fundamental question: Can we intervene in the natural process of ageing to prevent associated diseases and hence expand our lifespan? While Science advances emerge at unprecedented rates the possibility of manipulating ageing is being debated and experimentally tested by the scientific community, and attracting the attention of the social media. In this talk we will address the following (and many other related) questions: What is ageing and what are its hallmarks? For how long can humans live? Are we programmed to die? Is it possible to delay ageing and even to stop this process and repair our tissues? What is based on scientific principles and what are unfounded rumours? You will learn about different theories of ageing and about distinct therapeutic strategies to promote healthy ageing currently under experimental evaluation in preclinical models.