Cancer research boosted as Imperial chosen for new Research Centre

Imperial receives £2m grant from Cancer Research UK and the Department of Health to establish an Experimental Cancer Research Centre - News

By Laura Gallagher
Tuesday 17 October 2006

Cancer research at Imperial College received a major boost this month thanks to a £2m grant from Cancer Research UK and the Department of Health to establish an Experimental Cancer Research Centre.

The College will have one of 17 centres across the country, after being selected for its scientific and clinical excellence by an international review panel. Centres across the country will share knowledge and resources to ensure that the UK can translate lab-based cancer research into treatments for cancer patients as quickly as possible. Funding will cover clinical, laboratory and NHS infrastructure costs.

Imperial's Centre, based at the Hammersmith Hospital, will be principally concerned with uncovering the mechanisms that cause people to become resistant to cancer therapy. Such resistance is a major reason why patients die from cancer. It is a particularly important issue with diseases which have a good response rate to therapies, such as ovarian cancer; cancers of the lung, breast, prostate; and leukaemia. Accordingly, the Centre at Imperial will be focusing on these diseases. The Centres were announced on Monday 9 October.

Dr Charles Coombes , Head of the Department of Oncology and Principal Investigator for the research, said: "We are really delighted that Imperial has been chosen for an Experimental Cancer Research Centre. We are already carrying out plenty of exciting lab work on uncovering novel targets for therapy. Bringing new staff to the College through the Centre will allow us to move research out of the lab and into clinical trials much more quickly and effectively."

Michael Seckl , Professor of Molecular Cancer Medicine, will be managing the initiative and working alongside Professor Coombes as co-investigator on the research.

The other centres in the network will be at: Barts and the London, Birmingham, Belfast, Cambridge, Cardiff, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Institute of Cancer Research, King’s College London, Leeds-Bradford-Hull-York, Leicester, Manchester, Newcastle, Oxford, Southampton and University College London. Two further centres, Liverpool and Sheffield, will be under development and will receive grants of around £150,000 each year.

-ends-