Month: October 2017

Helping shape the future of Clinical Informatics

Professor Brendan Delaney, Chair in Medical Informatics and Decision Making has been elected as one of the 100 Founding Fellows of the new Faculty of Clinical Informatics and will work with a team of qualified clinicians who transform health and care through their specialist knowledge and use of data, information, knowledge and information technology.

The Faculty of Clinical Informatics is being established as the professional membership body for all clinical informaticians across the UK, with the aims of establishing clinical informatics as a recognised profession, developing professional standards, supporting revalidation, providing training and accreditation for individuals and courses, and supporting recruitment and careers in clinical informatics.

Find out more about the Faculty of Clinical Informatics.

Double success for PhD students

Two PhD students had success at the recent International Society for the Study of Trophoblastic Diseases (ISSTD) World Congress Meeting, which took place in Amsterdam this September.

PhD student Marina Georgiou won the Oral Science prize for the Best Junior Investigator, for her work to identify a potential new treatment for patients with drug-resistant gestational trophoblastic neoplasia.

Obstetrician trainee Linda Ibeto, who is doing a PhD jointly with Life Sciences and Surgery and Cancer won the Best Scientific Poster Award for her work on glycosylation changes in hCG and how this links to malignant progression compared to normal placental tissue.

Just how did John Keats’s medical training influence his poetry?

National Portrait Gallery London

A recently published paper by Emeritus Professor Sean Hughes looks at the influence John Keats’s brief medical career had on his poetry. The article is based on the Keats Lecture that Professor Hughes gave at the Apothecaries Hall earlier this year, which is jointly sponsored by Kings College, the Apothecaries and the Royal College of Surgeons.

John Keats’s short medical career has been well documented, but what did medicine actually mean to him as a career, why did he abandon it, and what influence did it have on his life and – more importantly – his work? This article focuses on Keats’s time at Guy’s and St Thomas’s Hospitals, looking at the surgeons he worked under and considering both why he chose not to pursue a career in medicine and why it is that this poet, above all others, resonates so with the medical profession.

Professor Hughes recently received the President’s Medal from the British Orthopaedic Research Society for outstanding contribution to the field of British orthopedic research, which was held at Imperial on 4th September 2017.

Read How did John Keats’s Medical Training Influence his Poetry?

Best Junior Investigator Award

Congratulations to PhD student Marina Georgiou who won the award for best junior investigator oral presentation in translational/basic research at the 19th World Congress of Gestational Trophoblastic Diseases Conference in Amsterdam from the 21-24 September, after winning a travel bursary award to attend.

Marina’s PhD research focuses on identifying the molecular dominants of development and chemoresistance in Gestational Trophoblastic Disease, under the supervision of Professor Michael Seckl and Dr Olivier Pardo. The title of Maria’s winning oral presentation was Cyclin dependent kinases 4 and 6 (CDK4/6) as a potential new therapeutic target in drug-resistant gestational trophoblastic neoplasia. 

CSM steal the show at Mass Spec conference in Salzburg

Congratulations to CSM Senior Research Technician Anna Mroz who won best poster at the Mass Spectrometry: Applications to the Clinical Lab Conference, which looks at accelerating the adoption and application of mass spectrometry in the clinical lab, that took place last month in Salzburg, Austria.

A team from CSM attended the conference, at which Professor Ian Wilson was selected to give the plenary lecture.

Read Anna’s winning poster entitled Metabolic Phenotyping of Cirrhotic Liver Samples by Desorption Electrospray Ionization Mass Spectrometry Imaging (DESI-MSI).