Jonathan Tugwood, of the Clinical and Experimental Pharmacology group, attended the British Thoracic Oncology Group 2015 Meeting in Dublin in January, where he presented a poster based on the ground-breaking research that was published in Nature Medicine last year (Hodgkinson et al., 2014).

Jonathan was delighted that the poster won one of the runner-up prizes of £100, a recognition that he described as quite a feat given that the meeting was mainly attended by clinicians. Although Jonathan was not an author on that seminal publication, he prepared the abstract and poster.

This important research was the first description of circulating tumour cells from small cell lung cancer patients being tumourigenic and provides a novel approach for the generation of clinically relevant preclinical models to study a disease with a clear unmet clinical need.