Welcome to the Cancer Group at the Primary Care Unit

The Cancer Group is headed by Professor Fiona Walter.

We are a team of multi-disciplinary researchers who focus our research on cancer screening, detection and early diagnosis, mainly in the community and primary care setting.

We are interested in developing strategies to prevent or detect symptomatic cancer earlier using new biomarkers, technological devices, smartphones and clinical decision support. We also conduct research on patient safety, and using risk stratified approaches and genetic advances to detect people at higher risk of cancer.

Our current work focuses on understanding patient pathways and interventions to improve diagnosis of the skin cancer melanoma, oesophageal, gastric, pancreatic, urological, brain, ovarian and colorectal cancer.

Our flagship international research and education programme, the CanTest Collaborative, funded by Cancer Research UK’s first Catalyst award, launched in 2017. This involves research collaborations across 4 UK institutions and with international partners in Australia, Europe and the US. We also work closely with other groups across the Cancer Research UK Cambridge Centre and the Eastern region, and have a parallel programme of research on cancer detection, early diagnosis and follow-up care with the University of Melbourne, Australia.