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New Allison Wilson grants awarded
16th October 2009
Awarded to Dr B Sharpe
Title of Research:Towards Individualised Platinum-Based
Chemotherapy Platinum based compounds form one of the major chemotherapy drug groups. These agents (e.g. cisplatin, carboplatin, oxaliplatin) have a broad range of activity and are used to treat many types of cancer. Currently there is no way of predicting an individual patient’s tolerance to these drugs and some patients experience unacceptable adverse side effects.
This project aims to develop a relatively simple test that will enable clinicians to personalise the chemotherapy treatment to maximise benefit and minimise toxicity. Preliminary work carried out jointly between the Universities of Loughborough and Leicester has shown that using advanced analytical techniques it is possible to measure the effect of these drugs at the molecular level in the blood of patients pre- and post-chemotherapy.
In this study we wish to develop the laboratory test further and to assess whether saliva samples can replace blood samples as a non-invasive test.
Awarded to Dr S Sale
Title of Research: Systems biology approach to identify biomarkers of efficacy in clinical intervention studies.
The demonstration of whether a novel putative cancer chemopreventive intervention possesses efficacy in humans takes years of costly trials. Therefore a major challenge in contemporary cancer chemoprevention drug development is to show biochemical changes (so-called efficacy biomarkers) in trial subjects after a relatively short period of intervention with the novel agent.
Unfortunately there is a lack of such biomarkers, which confounds decisions to be made as to the suitability of a novel agent for further costly development. We propose the use of a combination of state-of-the-art global gene microarray, proteomic and metabonomic analytical approaches to find novel biomarkers of chemopreventive efficacy.
Using biomatrix samples from a pre clinical study in which the colorectal cancer chemopreventive activity of a rice bran preparation has been tested, we plan to perform global gene microarray, proteomic and metabonomic analyses. The matching and unique expertise of the applicants allows application of a combination of modern technological platforms to the search for novel biomarkers. Biomarkers putatively identified in this study will subsequently be tested for their clinical viability in future intervention studies.
Overall this proposal will potentially identify a new panel of biomarkers to assist the development of new agents towards the clinic, thus ultimately benefiting individuals at risk of developing cancer.
Awarded to Dr P Jenkins
Title of Research:Novel Inhibitors of CDK4-Cyclin D1 as potential anti-cancer drugs.
Normal cells in the body grow naturally in a controlled way. The body has defence mechanisms which do not allow abnormal cells to grow and develop. Cancer cells are abnormal cells, they grow in an uncontrolled way, they avoid the defence mechanisms which normally result in controlled cell death and they can obtain a blood supply so that they can continue to develop into a tumour.
Localised tumours then invade other organs of the body. This project is aimed finding a drug to reactivate the control mechanism in cancer cells so the growth of tumours can be stopped
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