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Chiara Recchi graduated cum laude in Italy with a Master in the laboratory of Cesare Montecucco at the University of Padova. She then moved to France at the Pasteur Institute in the group of Brigitte Gicquel, where she obtained her PhD in Microbiology for her work on the virulence factors of Mycobacterium tuberculosis.

Later, she extended her interest to cell biology and she trained as a postdoc in the laboratory of Philippe Chavrier at the Curie Institute in Paris. Here she became involved in the study of intracellular trafficking and how this controls the metastatic properties of cancer cells.

She thus continued working in this field when in 2007 she moved to London, where she became research associate at the Imperial College in Miguel Seabra’s group. Here she developed her own project combining her expertise in intracellular trafficking with the lab’s experience in Rab proteins. This led to one of the first descriptions of Rab27a as key to tumour progression.

She now leads the Tumour Suppressor Group at the Ovarian Cancer Action Research Centre, directed by Hani Gabra, at Imperial College London.

Her main focus is to understand how the tumour suppressor protein OPCML controls trafficking and signalling of Receptor Tyrosine Kinases in ovarian cancer.

Dr Axel Walther is a medical oncologist and Director for Research in Oncology at University Hospitals Bristol. He is the co-lead for the Cancer Research Theme at the University of Bristol.

He completed his undergraduate degree at Cambridge University followed by Medical School at Oxford University. He trained at the Hammersmith, Middlesex and Royal Marsden Hospitals and obtained his PhD from University College London.

His research interests are genetic markers of cancer risk and outcome, and he has collaborated in the discovery of several low-penetrance colon cancer susceptibility loci, thought to make up part of the inherited risk of colon cancer. Dr Walther has presented these findings at global conferences, published in and reviewed articles for high-impact journals and contributed to textbooks on cancer.