Cancer Therapeutics

Research credentials

• 80% of the research activity of this group was judged to be of international quality and above in the 2008 Governmentled Research Assessment Exercise
• The Institute of Cancer Therapeutics is one of a few centres nationally that has all the necessary research tools and expertise in-house to provide training to progress anticancer medicines from concept to the clinic
• The Institute’s research programmes include Phase I clinical trials support through its partnership with the Cancer Medicine Research Unit and other clinicians based in Leeds and Bradford hospitals
• The Institute of Cancer Therapeutics incorporates the Tom Connors Cancer Research Centre and occupies a 5-storey purpose-built facility on the main University campus

Research areas:

Design and Synthesis of Novel Anticancer Medicines

The Institute of Cancer Therapeutics has full organic synthesis capability primarily supported by Yorkshire Cancer Research. Research is focused on the design and synthesis of novel compounds that are either tumour-activated and/or tumour-selective.

Target Discovery for Tumour-selective Therapies

Research centres around the identification and evaluation of novel targets that are over-expressed in tumours. The Institute has expertise in tissue microarrays and proteomics which are used to identify differences in normal and tumour tissue. Our focus is on enzymes and proteins that are likely to be unregulated or over-active as a consequence of the developing tumour architecture.

Models to Investigate Anticancer Therapies

The development of new anticancer medicines is entirely dependent on cancer models that truly reflect the clinical situation. Research is under way to develop models for overexpression of resistance factors, tumour vasculature, hypoxia (regions low in oxygen), and metastasis. These tumour properties most often result in failure of treatment in the clinic.

Metabolism and Fate of Anticancer Therapies

In cancer patients, medicines administered to treat the cancer are often limited by the body attempting to remove these foreign compounds. It mainly does this by biochemically modifying the medicines to increase their speed (pharmacokinetics) of removal from the body.

Research is under way to measure and predict these processes of drug metabolism and excretion. Absorption and distribution around the body are also important, and methods to monitor tumour burden of cancer medicines in order to predict their likely efficacy (pharmacodynamics) is a core expertise of the Institute of Cancer Therapeutics.

Read more:

• Institute of Cancer Therapeutics
• School of Life Sciences