Tom Bird is a Consultant Hepatologist and a Professor of Hepatobiliary Cancer at the University of Edinburgh.

His clinical practice expertise is in Hepatocellular Carcinoma (HCC), the most common form of liver cancer, and this work is based at Edinburgh’s Royal Infirmary in close collaboration with the Scottish Liver Transplant Unit.

As a clinical academic he leads a basic science research group, at the Cancer Research UK’s Scotland Institute, whose focus is on mechanistic understanding of HCC and translating therapies for precision medicine through comparing preclinical models to human cancer.

His group has developed a suite of over 30 highly phenotyped genetically engineered mouse models of HCC which align well with human disease biology and allied to this have collated a bank of over 300 organoid lines from the various genetically independent GEMMs.

These models have optimised the use of AAV mediated target delivery to the liver and incorporate a broader range of CRISPR and immunological modifications linked also to his previous experience in vaccine development and immunology.

He leads the preclinical models work package for the HUNTER HCC European Consortium and serves as a joint lead for Liver Cancer within the CRUK Scotland Centre, as well as being involved in a number of early phase clinical studies in HCC therapy and early detection guided by his group’s research.