Head & Neck Cancer Foundation launch at House of Lords
Wednesday 18th of November 2015 saw the birth of a new and exciting organisation, lead and supported by members of the Dental Institute's Tissue Engineering & Biophotonics Division. The “Head & Neck Cancer Foundation” chaired by Sir Frederick Bathurst, is the brainchild of Mark McGurk (pictured). It is a new charity, aimed at improving the quality of life for anyone potentially facing the “horror” diagnosis of cancer – in this instance in the head & neck region.
Lord & Lady Burns, along with Mark and his colleague Luke Cascarini from KCL & GSTT, hosted a formal evening launch for the Charity in the River Room of the House of Lords (formerly the Lord Chancellor’s quarters in the Upper House). The evening was introduced by Sir Kenneth Brannagh and hosted 80 guests, drawn from the country’s most influential leaders and policy makers. The aim was to demonstrate how vital the Charity’s role is in reducing the impact of surgery both physically and emotionally, by finding lesions earlier and minimising the intrusions of surgery – tailoring it to the individual’s needs rather than following automaton intervention pathways.
A significant number of KCL TEB colleagues were present, demonstrating their innovations and developments in many aspects of Head and Neck disease care. Clare Schilling demonstrated Surgiceye – a virtual reality navigation instrument. The technology is capable of combining real-time scintigraphy and other imaging datasets within a patient’s 3D medical imaging (CT, MRI etc) and offering real-time intra-operative navigation in a graphic display, to guide the operators to local areas of suspicious tissue such as the sentinel lymph node draining a cancer. Such 3D guidance minimises operative damage to the patient and informs the surgical decision on extent of definitive surgery. GSTT / KCL DI are the only institution in the UK to own one and part of HNCF’s drive is to spearhead uptake of guided sentinel node and guided interventions across the UK. Richard Cook & Fred Festy also deomonstrated the oral cancer imaging potential of the Micro-Vascularoscope, a KCL invention, allowing the earliest cancers to be detected before clinical suspicion is raised. It works by demonstrating the local host vascular responses to invading tissue at high resolution, in real time and without prior patient preparation. If you would like to know more about the activity of many TEB memebers within the Foundation, its website is available at http://hncf.org.uk/
Fred Festy and Richard Cook