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Professor Philip Quirke leads the Leeds Institute of Medical Research Division of Pathology and Data Analytics and the Pathology Colorectal Cancer Group. He is the Academic Training Programme Director for West Yorkshire, an Honorary Consultant Pathologist at the Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust, a past President of the Pathological Society of Great Britain and Ireland, and an emeritus NIHR Senior Investigator.
His major interests lie in bowel cancer, with two significant Yorkshire Cancer Research programmes. The first, funded at £1.5M, focuses on the quality of surgery and multidisciplinary treatment, response to therapy in clinical trials in colorectal cancer, screening, and digital pathology with artificial intelligence. The second, funded at £3.6M, aims to improve outcomes in colorectal cancer in Yorkshire and the Humber. Professor Quirke's team also conducts microbiome research within the OPTIMISTICC CRUK Grand Challenge, exploring the causation, screening, and biology of bowel cancer. Additionally, they are assessing new forms of microscopy through an NIHR i4i project grant with Oxford Nano Instruments, and investigating liquid biopsy and colorectal cancer mutation detection in faeces through another NIHR i4i grant. Their digital pathology projects are funded by various bodies and showcased at virtualpathology.leeds.ac.uk. The team is involved in over 30 lower GI cancer trials.
Professor Quirke's group is part of the NIHR Biomedical Research Centre and collaborates on a CRUK programme with Professor Eva Morris to link routine datasets in colorectal neoplasia. He is also part of the Northern Pathology Imaging Consortium led by Professor Darren Treanor and leads the N6 digital Pathology network of Leeds, Manchester, Liverpool, Nottingham, Sheffield, and Newcastle, along with its associated Roche/NIHR academic pathology training programme. They use molecular testing to select targeted therapies in the MRC Focus 4 trial and are part of the national MRC SCORT network, which aims to discover new molecular markers. The group's powerful bowel cancer AI digital pathology research team includes Professor Grabsch, Dr. Magee, Dr. Kather, and Dr. West.
Professor Quirke oversees 14 young academic histopathologists in training, including a clinician scientist, three NIHR CLs, an MRC postdoctoral CTRF, CRUK Welcome Trust and MRC PhD CTRFs, and six ACFs, four of whom have PhDs.
He collaborates with international colleagues from institutions such as Dana Farber, Harvard, John Hopkins, Guelph, the Karolinska Hospital in Stockholm, University of Erlangen, University of Aarhus in Denmark, Tokyo University, Cancer Hospital Chennai in India, Italian Hospital in Buenos Aires, and hospitals in Santiago, Chile, Vietnam, Ghana, and South Africa. His AI group works with the Universities of Aachen, Maastricht, and Roskilde.
Professor Quirke is a Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences, an emeritus NIHR Senior Investigator, and an Honorary Fellow of several prestigious organizations, including the American College of Colon and Rectal Surgeons, the Association of Coloproctology of Great Britain and Ireland, the Royal College of Surgeons Edinburgh (ad hominem), the Faculty of Pathology of the Royal College of Physicians of Ireland, Dublin, the Sociedad de Coloproctologica North West Argentina, the Societad de Coloproctologica Chile, and holds a Doctor Honoris Causa from the University of Iasi, Romania. He has received the McKeown and Miles medals.