Thank you all so much for joining me here at the Drill Hall today. In case you don't know, my name is Felicity. I am an artist here at the Drill Hole. I actually also used to be a scientist. Today, the theme of the workshop is all about liver cancer and liver disease. I'm so grateful to Shish and to Chris and to Paul and all of the other scientists from the University of Birmingham who have taken me on board as their artist in residence to make art about liver cancer.
So it's my mission to try and make art about that that communicates to the general public. But it's also very much my mission to represent the patients experience and not forget the patient experience, to make that integral to the art that I create.
What we want to try and understand is how we can target these immune cells effectively by harnessing blood vessels. Blood vessels bring immune cells to the liver and they control the populations, the different types of populations which accumulate in the liver. And we need to understand that we have poor understanding of how that is controlled. And so using imaging techniques, microscopy techniques, we can visualise what's going on. But with help from our mathematician colleagues, we can hopefully try to analyse the data to understand what kind of communication is going on between blood vessels and immune immune cells.
So I'm here because I'm really passionate about liver disease and liver cancer, and I want to be part of a community that make life better for people with that disease. What we're trying to do is all about trying to help people. So if it's not involving the people that we're trying to help, then you'll get lost. You don't know what you're doing. So it's really important. And I think it it also kind of reminds me and it is really important for me to bring in the people that I work with who don't see patients.
My liver disease was through alcohol, I'm a peer supporter at Edinburgh Royal. Liver disease is a soul destroying thing, but I was lucky enough to not to know that I did have liver cancer. I only found liver cancer after I had a transplant.
Cancer Research UK and the British Liver Trust are really concerned about the increasing rise of primary liver cancer in the United Kingdom. Often patients have a liver disease underlying which causes a complex, it adds to the complexity around the cancer. So the liver disease has its own biological pathways and the cancer and its own biological processes and they seem to merge together.
Now I have a very lucky position being artist in residence for the Centre for Systems Modelling and Quantitative Biomedicine. I'm working with a fantastic group of researchers on liver cancer. The thing that I've really loved about this project is how integral the patient experiences have been for the researchers. Through moving your hands, through the actual motor action of making marks and doing drawings, you can free up new ways of thinking and new parts of conversation, and it's a leveller.
So I'm here representing British Liver Trust. I am their outreach project manager, so I manage a number of support groups, but one in particular would be liver cancer. So I run a liver cancer support group across the UK. And in something like this, it's completely different. You don't have to ask how you're feeling. You can express yourself differently on paper and everyone can. All the different people affected by it can. And I think maybe it's a way of them expressing it without really having to tell people what I'm going through. Just expressing that through colour or through vision, through to drawing. I just think it's something completely different. Really interesting.
A lot of problems nowadays, we understand that they're not just a biology problem, or just a maths problem. And it's very important to work with other people who are specialists in a different field and try and together overcome some issues which we might initially think is only a biological issue, only a mathematical issue. But it turns out we're working on very similar things and what we do is important to them and what they do is really important to us as well to develop new methods, which I think is really exciting.
I'm a liver patient from the Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Birmingham. I wish that there wasn't a stigma attached to liver disease because the layman's assumption is that it's due to an alcohol. I don't judge other people and I know that there's reasons why people turn to alcohol, but that wasn't the reason for my disorder. I'm so grateful to the medics and the hospital that I've engaged in PPI work. It's a great experience and it's nice to be able to sort of just let your thoughts flow onto the paper.
There are some commonalities that exist within liver cancer, and we're trying to identify those pathways that we might be able to find some therapeutic treatments. And in Birmingham, we're very well positioned to do this because we have the support of our BRC, which allows us to communicate between both researchers, the clinicians and our clinical trials unit.
I'm the mathematician on the project, and so I'm using mathematical and computational methods to analyse the images that Shishir and Chris have provided us with. I guess where perhaps art goes beyond the science is the ability to capture some of the emotions that are involved in a way that science can be, or at least is perceived to be, quite cold and clinical, whereas art can bring out the emotional side of that, both in terms of what the scientists are experiencing, the excitement of research, but also in terms of what those with lived experience are going through.
Immune therapy is a is a major breakthrough in treating patients, but we still have a significant number of patients who don't respond. And we want to improve the effectiveness of immune therapy for our patients. And we're hoping to explain the research that's being funded by Cancer Research UK through workshops such as the one we're holding today.
