Cancer is major research focus at Imperial College London. We have built an innovative cancer research and basic science portfolio, complemented with cutting edge technologies.

One of the keys to an improved understanding of cancer, from diagnosis to treatment, is to appreciate the mechanisms that cancer cells use to divide and metastasise. As many individuals relapse following initial therapy, it is crucial to identify the factors implicated in resistance to standard therapy, with the ultimate aim of increasing the cure rate.

One of our major objectives is to enhance cancer prevention and improve treatment outcome for patients. This is achieved through an understanding of how key biochemical pathways are changed in cancer, the underlying genetic and epigenetic alterations driving these biochemical changes and using this knowledge to stratify patients for the best molecularly targeted therapies.

Research centres

Our current research centres are a testament to the excellence in cancer research at Imperial:

• The Cancer Research UK Imperial Centre integrates core biological cancer expertise with surgical technology, imaging, engineering, chemistry, computing and physics to evaluate new technologies.

• Imperial Experimental Cancer Medicine Centre funded by CRUK and the NIHR is developing novel imaging-, biomarker- and therapeutic approaches for cancer, with a particular focus on reversing drug resistance and aiding personalised treatments.

• Ovarian Cancer Action Research Centre is a partnership of Imperial, the Royal Marsden Hospital and the Institute for Cancer Research (ICR) that focuses on improving our understanding of the genetic and molecular changes that lead to ovarian cancer to further ways of detecting, treating and preventing the disease.

Our translational cancer research is also supported by our NIHR Imperial Biomedical Research Centre (BRC) in collaboration with Imperial College NHS Healthcare Trust.