Professor Phil Quirke
This profile is from the MRC Annual Review 08/09: A day of discovery. The review takes readers on a journey through a day in the life of the MRC, dropping in on people involved in MRC research as they go about their daily business to find out what they’re doing.
Yorkshire Cancer Research Centenary Chair of Pathology and honorary consultant at the Leeds Institute of Molecular Medicine.
Professor Phil Quirke is an MRC-funded pathologist who researches ways to better treat bowel cancer.
The morning’s lab meeting has just finished and Professor Phil Quirke and some researchers in his group are looking at microscope images of a bowel cancer. The images are deceptively beautiful for something so deadly, resembling a pink and white landscape complete with river deltas and mountain peaks.
Findings published last year by Phil, David Sebag-Montefiore and MRC Clinical Trials Unit colleagues are helping to change the outlook for patients with this disease. The MRC CR07/CO16 trial has shown that a short course of radiotherapy combined with high quality surgery dramatically reduces local recurrence of rectal cancer.
“Local recurrence in the pelvis is horrible,” explains Phil. “You can have it for six or nine months and be in intolerable pain. So to find a way of reducing rates of recurrence is very exciting, and these findings will actually change medical practice.”
Phil is a research pathologist, which contrary to popular belief, does not involve doing many autopsies. “Most people think that pathologists cut up dead bodies all the time – but autopsies are a very small part of our workload. When I do occasionally do it now, it’s to harvest tissue for research. Most of our work’s concerned with the living and involves assessing surgical material from living people. We make a diagnosis of the disease; we work out what stage the disease has got to and from there help decide how it should be treated.”
So what inspired Phil to specialise in pathology? “If you’re an individual surgeon you treat one person at a time, so over your career you’ll treat maybe two or three thousand people with a particular disease. Whereas research pathologists look at the basis of disease – so if you can do something to change a treatment or prevent a disease then you could potentially help millions of people worldwide.”
“What I love about this job is seeing the new results and thinking about their implications – and then telling people about them. And also working with young researchers to try and interest them in a career where they’ll tackle the same sort of questions in future.”
Training the next generation is something that Phil is passionate about, particularly since CR07 showed that the technique used in most bowel cancer operations worldwide is leaving tumour tissue behind in patients. He and his colleagues have a master plan to start training programmes across the world in the new surgical technique. Plans are afoot to train every surgeon in Denmark, as that country has the worst colorectal cancer mortality figures in Western Europe. “Denmark has a population of 16 million, and I think we’ll be able to demonstrate a significant rise in their survival because of what we’ve done,” says Phil.
“If I’m remembered for anything, I hope it will be for improving understanding of some of the reasons why colorectal cancer recurs, and demonstrating that we can do something about it by improving the planes within which surgeons operate. Hopefully before I retire I’d like to see these improvements in rectal, low rectal and then colonic surgery so that we’ll gain a 10 to 20 per cent improvement in five-year survival rates at very little cost.”
Published August 2009