Within the series “Cancer from another angle” organised by CIC bioGUNE, and the British Council have invited Prof. Tim Cox to give a lecture on “What Rare Means?"
Nature is generous in her senseless experiments on mankind. The rarity of a disease is no consolation for those afflicted - even though today it may become an attractive ‘target’ for biotech investment.
Patients with rare diseases are vulnerable but articulate engagement in their own world makes scientific sense: it will soon be the dominant force in an ever-expanding world of discovery and ‘ownership’. Here we remind ourselves of ‘What rare means’ – in its complexity - and glorious simplicity.
T M Cox is Professor of Medicine emeritus and Director of Research at the University of Cambridge. From 1989-2014 he was the founding Director of the Cambridge MB/PhD programme, the first in the UK. Apart from general clinical medicine, his personal interests are in inborn errors of metabolism – pathogenesis and molecular therapies. He has been a physician in London and Cambridge and trained in London, Oxford and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA.