Colin Watts MBBS, PhD, FRCS

Dr Watts research group aims to improve the treatment and survival of patients with Glioblastoma (GB) by understanding the molecular genetic heterogeneity of individual tumours and using that data to develop novel molecular stratification of GB suitable for application in clinical trial design. His group has established protocols for the efficient derivation of tumour-initiating stem-like cells and used them to develop patient-specific models of GBM. He has adapted fluorescent surgery to develop Fluorescence-Guided Multiple Sampling (FGMS), which allows spatially discrete tissue samples to be taken from individual patients. This is providing novel insights into the impact of surgical sampling bias on our understanding of the complex genomic landscape of GBM, its clonal architecture and phylogeny at the level of the individual patient. Future work aims to develop FGMS to investigate glioma ontogeny and transcriptional regulatory dynamics in defined clinical patient populations.