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The United Kingdom has been severely affected by the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic. As the National Health Service (NHS) has urgently prioritized management of this outbreak, the UK clinical oncology community has had to adapt rapidly to maintain cancer services and training. These unprecedented times have altered countless aspects of cancer care, education, and research, providing a legacy that will extend well beyond the pandemic that catalyzed them. This editorial focuses on 3 key themes that distinguish the United Kingdom from many other countries.

The three-dimensional imaging of mesoscopic samples with Optical Projection Tomography (OPT) has become a powerful tool for biomedical phenotyping studies. OPT uses visible light to visualize the 3D morphology of large transparent samples. To enable a wider application of OPT, we present OptiJ, a low-cost, fully open-source OPT system capable of imaging large transparent specimens up to 13 mm tall and 8 mm deep with 50 µm resolution. OptiJ is based on off-the-shelf, easy-to-assemble optical components and an ImageJ plugin library for OPT data reconstruction. The software includes novel correction routines for uneven illumination and sample jitter in addition to CPU/GPU accelerated reconstruction for large datasets. We demonstrate the use of OptiJ to image and reconstruct cleared lung lobes from adult mice. We provide a detailed set of instructions to set up and use the OptiJ framework. Our hardware and software design are modular and easy to implement, allowing for further open microscopy developments for imaging large organ samples.

Androgen receptor (AR) and hypoxia inducible factor 1a (HIF1a) are transcription factors that promote prostate cancer progression and radioresistance. This study investigated the relationship between the AR and HIF1a signaling pathways.

© Published under licence by IOP Publishing Ltd. A system has been developed to provide flexible, efficient and robust processing of radiotherapy planning and treatment data collected in the VoxTox project, which investigates differences between planned and delivered dose, and dose-toxicity correlations. This paper outlines the system requirements and implementation, highlighting the use made of software tools and computing models developed for experiments at the Large Hadron Collider. Experience with VoxTox data processing is summarised.