Dr Ferdia Gallagher is an academic radiologist and CRUK-funded Senior Research Fellow who leads the Clinical Molecular Imaging Group in the Department of Radiology. His laboratory develops new functional and molecular imaging methods to detect cancer and early response to therapy, with the aim of translating these techniques into humans.

His team is particularly interested in methods to probe cancer metabolism non-invasively and he leads the clinical hyperpolarised carbon-13 MRI programme in Cambridge. Hyperpolarised MRI is an emerging method to non-invasively assess tissue metabolism using pyruvate as a probe to visualise tumour lactate formation and we are currently studying this technique in a number of human tumours. We have established a bespoke pharmacy facility on site to enable this and are developing new molecules for use in patients. The group is also interested in the application of proton spectroscopy to study tumour metabolism, as well as other multinuclear and multimodality approaches such as sodium MRI and PET/CT. We are applying these methods to monitor treatment response in a range of settings, including the use of immunotherapy. We are also studying novel cell labelling approaches to complement more conventional approaches to monitor immune infiltration into tumours.