One in Two: A Manchester Cancer Research Podcast

Season 2 - Lung Cancer: From basic biology to transformative therapies

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Cancer biomarkers with Professor Caroline Dive: How liquid biopsies could pave the way for lung cancer detection and treatment

With one in two of us receiving a cancer diagnosis at some point during our lives, it has never been more important to improve the outcomes for people affected by cancer.   

In this episode, we speak to Professor Caroline Dive, Professor of Cancer Pharmacology at The University of Manchester, Interim Director of the Cancer Research UK Manchester Institute and Director of the CRUK Cancer Biomarker Centre, about cancer biomarkers in lung cancer, focussing on:

Establishing a Cancer Biomarker Centre in Manchester
Developing liquid biopsies such as circulating tumour cells (CTCs), circulating free DNA (cfDNA) and circulating tumour DNA (ctDNA)
The future of integrating novel biomarkers into the clinic

Biomarkers are a whole range of things, but essentially they are molecules measured in a clinical sample usually that help us support the management of a patient. They may tell us what type of therapy a patient will respond to, they might tell us whether they're at risk of a toxic side effect and they might help us to diagnose cancer early.

Professor Caroline Dive

Cancer biomarkers with Professor Caroline Dive: How liquid biopsies could pave the way for lung cancer detection and treatment

Listen to the episode now on The University of Manchester YouTube channel

Professor Caroline Dive

Upon completing her PhD studies in Cambridge, Professor Caroline Dive moved to Aston University’s School of Pharmaceutical Sciences in Birmingham where she established her own group studying mechanisms of drug-induced tumour cell death, before moving to The University of Manchester to continue this research. Caroline was awarded a Lister Institute of Preventative Medicine Research Fellowship before joining the Cancer Research UK Manchester Institute (CRUK MI) in 2003.

Currently, she is Interim Director of the Institute and Director of its Cancer Biomarker Centre, with research spanning tumour biology, biomarker discovery and preclinical pharmacology alongside regulated laboratories for biomarker assay validation and qualification within clinical trials to Good Clinical Practice standards supporting clinical decision-making.

Caroline was awarded the Pasteur-Weizmann/Servier International Prize in 2012 for her Biomarker Research, the AstraZeneca Prize for Women in Pharmacology in 2016 and was presented with the 2019 Heine H. Hansen Lectureship Award by the International Association for the Study of Lung Cancer (IASLC). In 2018, Caroline was awarded Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) for her services to cancer research. Most recently, she became an elected member of EMBO (2020), received the inaugural Johann Anton Merck Award in recognition for exceptional contributions to the field of preclinical oncology (2020) and was the recipient of the Mary J. Matthews Pathology/Translational Distinguished Service Award by IASLC (2021). Caroline was President of the European Association for Cancer Research from 2020 – 2022.