About Prof. Alastair Lamb

Alastair Lamb is a Cancer Research UK funded clinician scientist & urologist at the Nuffield Department of Surgical Sciences, Oxford where he runs the SPACE Lab (https://www.nds.ox.ac.uk/research/prostate-biology/areas-of-research/spatial-clonal-biolog).

His particular interest is the molecular basis of localised prostate cancer. His lab interrogate spatial clonal biology to unpack prostate cancer heterogeneity, with a focus on identifying and defining clonal lethality with the longer term objective of changing the paradigm of prostate cancer screening, diagnosis and treatment.

The first part of this work was published in Nature in 2022 (www.nature.com/articles/s41586-022-05023-2; youtu.be/YdzF0-PFXhc) with a follow up analysis in Molecular Cancer in 2023 (molecular-cancer.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12943-023-01863-2). Between 2021 and 2023 he set up the QUANTUM Biobank at Oxford (https://www.nds.ox.ac.uk/quantum) to facilitate tissue collections complementing research into urological malignancies.

There are plans to expand QUANTUM to include other collaborating UK centres. He is also involved in clinical trials research, as co-Chief Investigator of the TRANSLATE Trial (translate.octru.ox.ac.uk/welcome-translate-trial), and a local Investigator for the ATLANTA (www.imperialprostate.org/atlanta), PROMOTE (https://twitter.com/ThePROMOTEstudy) and FINESSE Trials (https://www.finessetrial.org/).

Clinically, he is one of five consultants managing patients with prostate cancer in Oxford, performing around half of the unit’s 200 robotic prostatectomies per annum. He also introduced LATP prostate biopsy to Oxford as well as a RARP planning meeting to ensure robust discussion of all cases and a consensus approach to nerve-sparing, apical dissection, and lymph node dissection (https://youtu.be/p_XVH7DAFD8). Since his arrival in Oxford in 2017, after a GU Oncology fellowship at Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre in Melbourne, unit positive margin rates have dropped year on year, and there have been incremental improvements in continence outcomes with the introduction of the anterior retzius-sparing technique.

MCRC Seminar: Prof. Alastair Lamb