Precision Cancer Medicine MSc

University of Oxford

The MSc in Precision Cancer Medicine is a two year, part-time, online course that will provide you with the multidisciplinary skillset and knowledge required to design, conduct and lead precision medicine research.

The course will appeal to health professionals from a variety of backgrounds including clinical academics, diagnosticians, scientists and clinicians from academia and industry; bio-informaticians, statisticians and scientists and clinicians working in all stages of target discovery and drug development.

Precision medicine is an emerging approach which takes into account variability in the biology, environment, and lifestyle for each individual person to help guide disease diagnosis and treatment. In particular, genetic and genomic data allow us to go beyond conventional histopathological assessment, and classify cancer into distinct sub-entities, leading to novel molecularly-directed treatment approaches.

To realise the potential for precision medicine, the clinical development of diagnostics and therapeutics need to go hand in hand. Future leaders – whether in research or in the clinic – will need a broad understanding of the field and the ability to work with a range of stakeholders.

This course aims to deliver a broad overview of the scientific and clinical disciplines involved in precision medicine. You will cover the scientific basis for precision medicine, current technologies, drug discovery and development, and the global regulatory, payer and ethical challenges.

The course consists of eight modules:

• Introduction to Human Genetics and Genomics
• Applied Precision Diagnostics
• Omics Techniques and their Application to Genomic Medicine
• Clinical Bio-Informatics
• Treatment, Pharmacogenomics, Clinical Trials and Experimental Cancer Therapeutics
• Ethics and Health Economics
• Molecular Pathology and Imaging
• Onco-immunology and Genomics

The course will be taught using state-of-the art technology via the University’s virtual learning environment (VLE) platform, Canvas. Core and guest lectures are pre-recorded, and will be available for you to watch in your own time, alongside recommended reading and other coursework activities. You will attend regular online discussion groups, with a small group of fellow students, which will be moderated by members of faculty. For these sessions you will be expected to prepare short essays and presentations for discussion. Each module also has a moderated Q&A session and online tests for you to check your understanding.

The taught modules conclude in March of year two with a compulsory week-long residential school in Oxford, to consolidate your learning. For the final five months you will work on a dissertation. The aim of the dissertation is to enable you to explore an area relevant to Precision Cancer Medicine in depth and to develop a carefully considered and critical piece of written work related to this chosen area of study.

As this is on online course, you will need to manage your own study time. The scheduled teaching that you will be required to attend are fortnightly online discussion groups. To support your learning, you will be provided with lectures, required reading, and assignments for the discussion groups. It will be up to you to plan how and when to use these materials, and to broaden your knowledge by reading around key topics (known as ‘self-directed learning’).