Research project - Investigation of biological changes in cancer towards the end of life (METEL)

There is a single medical problem that every human being on the planet suffers from: everyone dies.

The first question is whether, for a given disease, this process is entirely stochastic or is in fact deterministic. For patients dying from lung cancer we have shown that the latter is in fact true, and that in consequence we can for the first time predict the time of death several days and even weeks before it occurs.

This project contributes to the important but poorly understood area of biology. Our ‘Biology of Dying’ work, asking ‘How do we die?’ has opened a new avenue of research for which we are the world leaders. Understanding the processes of dying including developing tests predicting time until death thus permits patients and their families to prepare appropriately and represents a massive, unique and ground-breaking uplift in the quality of patient care at the end of life.