Molecular Surveillance (It’s Hot Stuff!)

Long before anatomical changes, diseases can activate subtle molecular processes that can play a key role for early diagnosis, but are far more difficult to detect. Radioactivity can help us to visualise biological processes otherwise invisible to the human eye. Join us for a fascinating journey into radioactive molecules and how we can use them to ‘switch on the light’ and see what’s happening inside our bodies.

Rick started life as a cardiovascular biologist, but over the last 15 years has slowly mutated into a molecular imaging scientist. This may be due to the large amounts of radioactivity that he works with. Tonight, if you pay him sufficient beer, he will describe to you how new molecular imaging technologies may be able to detect disease earlier than ever before, how ironically this may actually be a problem for today’s cancer patients, and what he proposes to do about it.

Ever wondered where all these drugs and medicines actually go inside your body? Rafa is a chemist that develops methods to label drugs with radioactivity to allow us to see their location inside the body! From the medicinal to the recreational; over the course of his talk he will not only show you how to track these drugs internally, but also how better drugs can be designed - and whether one day we will be able to predict which patients will benefit from the drugs and who will not.