We deal with star deaths, they deal with patient deaths
- Nic Walton
Despite their red-brick finish, the corridors of the Institute of Astronomy can seem more like an art gallery than a research centre, so beautiful are the images of supernovae and nebulae hanging there. Dr Nic Walton passes these every day as he makes his way to his office to study the formation of the Milky Way and search for planets outside our solar system.
On the screen of Walton’s computer is what appears to be a map of stars in our Milky Way. In fact, it is something that is around 25 orders of magnitude smaller (that’s ten followed by 25 zeros).
It is an image of cells taken from a biopsy of a patient with breast cancer; the ‘stars’ are the cells’ nuclei, stained to indicate the presence of key proteins. It is the similarities between these patterns and those of astronomical images that he, together with colleagues at the Cancer Research UK (CRUK) Cambridge Institute, is exploiting in PathGrid, an interdisciplinary initiative to help automate the analysis of biopsy tissue.
“Both astronomy and cell biology deal with huge numbers: our Milky Way contains several billion stars, our bodies tens of trillions of cells,” explained Walton.
PathGrid began at a cross-disciplinary meeting in Cambridge to discuss data management. Walton has been involved for many years with major international collaborations that, somewhat appropriately, amass an astronomical amount of data. But accessing data held by research teams across the globe was proving to be a challenge, with a lack of standardised protocols. Something needed to be done and Walton was part of an initiative to sort out this mess.
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Image Credit: The District
Reproduced courtesy of the University of Cambridge
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