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I’m a PhD student who uses a really cool nuclear physics technique called Dynamic Nuclear Polarisation to try and spot brain cancer.

The technique works by making a chemical (called pyruvate) visible to an MRI scanner, and it turns out that what happens to that chemical is different in cancer cells to ordinary cells. Because of the way MRI works, I’m able to follow that chemical in five dimensions — three in space, time, and “chemical space”, i.e. what it’s been turned into by the body. This chemical, pyruvate is transformed into another substance called lactic acid, which, incidentally, is what’s responsible for making stitches painful during exercise (as well as yoghurt sour, and cancers able to invade nearby cells).

In cancer cells, the amount of lactic acid produced is far greater than that in healthy cells, and it’s the focus of my research to try and use this difference to spot cancer early, in difficult and aggressive forms of cancer in the brain where early treatment is key to helping patients survive.

The actual nuclear physics process itself is quite exciting — it involves introducing hot (200 ºC) liquids at around 10x atmospheric pressure being introduced to very, very cold solids at around -272 ºC  to form (quickly, and in essentially a controlled explosion) a 37 ºC pyruvate-containing liquid that is then injected into someone (or something) inside an MRI scanner.  With luck, I’ll be able to image the produced lactate in cancers before you can ordinarily see the tumours on a clinical scan.

There’s no such thing as a typical day in science!

To expand a bit on what I mean, some of my experiments run for many weeks, where I’ll be using the MRI scanner from about 5 am to lunchtime three or four days a week for one or two months. In the afternoon I’ll process the data, and try to make sense of what I’m seeing. Other days I’ll try and work out how to better program the scanner — this is quite a complicated process, where I’ll have to do maths and run simulations on my computer in the office, before moving on to programming instructions for what I want the scanner to do. I’ll then have to spend some time — usually quite a lot of time — trying to install those instructions on the scanner, and running lots of (relatively boring) calibration experiments on tubes of water/vegetable oil/acetone/100%-isotopically-pure-13C-enriched-urea-which-costs-about-£300-per-ml-for-what-is-essentially-wee-wee. Sometimes I can run these sorts of experiments over the weekend or overnight (and I might have to come in to massage them). I also sometimes do some more traditional ‘wet-lab’ based laboratory work, which involves a lot of moving tiny quantities of colourless liquids into tiny plastic phials, before understanding what their contents are. I also get to do quite a lot of “making stuff”, in engineering workshops. So, for instance, next week I’m going to spend four days precision engineering pieces of plastic to make a structure for use in a scanner.

Of course, like any job, there are days where you spend the whole day the desk doing paperwork — but in my case, that’s like to be writing talks, marking work for the classes I teach (mathematics, computing and biological physics), writing papers or applying for grants — or planning experiments — rather than something truly boring!