Abstract

Mr Grant D Stewart is the Senior Clinical Lecturer in Urological Surgery at the University of Edinburgh and Honorary Consultant Urological Surgeon at Western General Hospital, NHS Lothian, Edinburgh.

Grant is a practicing urological surgeon with clinical expertise in kidney cancer surgery and leads the Edinburgh Urological Cancer Group, undertaking translational research into renal cell cancer (RCC). Grant directs the Scottish Collaboration On Translational Research into Renal Cell Cancer (SCOTRRCC) a Scotland-wide kidney cancer bio-repository with high quality clinical data linkage. To date biosamples (fresh frozen, FFPE , blood, urine) have been collected from 950 patients as part of SCOTRRCC , leveraging translational kidney cancer research across Scotland.

Over a 5y post-doctoral career Grant has been awarded >£2.6 million research funding and to date published 73 peer reviewed publications (h-index=19). Mr Stewart is a member of the National Cancer Research Institute Renal Cancer Clinical Studies Group, Chair of the Renal Cross Channel Group, PI for several renal cancer clinical trials, supervises 5 PhD students and is Course Director for RCS Ed/University of Edinburgh ChM in Urology.

In addition to SCOTRRCC , Grant has been successfully coordinated a 387 patients prostate cancer diagnostics trial, resulting in a commercially available test in USA (ConfirmMDx).

In his seminar, Grant will outline the reasons for failure to develop prognostic and predictive biomarkers in RCC and the unique challenges that translational research into RCC brings. The SCOTRRCC infrastructure and associated experimental approaches will be outlined which incorporate many ideal practices in RCC biomarker research using a systems biology framework. Grant will illustrate the successful utilization of SCOTRRCC to develop the theme of intratumoural heterogeneity and the effect of targeted drug therapy on this process. Finally, putative predictive and prognostic biomarker signatures developed in the face of intratumoural heterogeneity will be outlined.