The Manchester Cancer Research Centre was established in 2006
and is a partnership between The University of Manchester,
Cancer Research UK,
and The Christie.
The aim of this partnership is to really bring together the cancer research activities in these three great organisations.
Cancer patients are very different from each other
and yet in the past we've treated patients as if they are all the same.
That's not the way we'll treat patients in the future.
In the future, we'll take the characteristics of individual patients
and use that knowledge to really guide us in the best treatment
that might be most effective for that particular patient.
That's what we call personalised medicine,
and the whole ethos of the Manchester Cancer Research Centre
really is to drive that personalised medicine future in Manchester.
So it's a great benefit for my research at The Christie hospital in personalised medicine
to be part of Manchester Cancer Research Centre.
In the work that I do at The Christie,
where we take new drugs into man for the first time,
historically the rates of patient benefit have been low,
and we're hoping that personalised medicine,
by using the molecular profile of the tumour,
and matching them to the appropriate drug,
that more patients will benefit with that approach.
BRCA2 gene is a mutated gene
that they've realised causes breast cancer
and can be the cause of other female cancers.
I got the cancer, and was diagnosed as being a carrier,
which affects our children and future generations in our family.
I've been coming to The Christie for over 13 years now,
and I'm always absolutely amazed at every time I need to change treatment,
that I'm offered a choice of very different treatments
and I've been very lucky enough to have personalised medicine
through the work of Cancer Research UK here at The Christie.
So it is invaluable to us as a family,
but certainly for other families and people who suffer from cancer.
When we developed the Manchester Cancer Research Centre
we realised we had a fantastic opportunity
to really build a world-class translational research unit
here in Manchester.
But we also realised that we needed to expand our activities,
to bring different scientists, different clinicians, onto this site.
In order to do that, we had to build a new building.
Within the building there's five different lab blocks
which will house a number of different groups
working on different aspects of cancer research.
Whether it be lung cancer research,
melanoma research,
research into aspects of personalised medicine.
I think one of the benefits we don't often appreciate
is that conducting research is a very human thing.
It's human beings talking to one another,
understanding each other's points of view.
I think in the past, science has been conducted in silos:
All the chemists are together, all the biologists are together,
all the physicists are together.
The Manchester Cancer Research Centre has broken those silos,
and has brought us all under one roof in this fantastic new building.
I think we're going to see, as we fill this building with new talents,
bringing it all together under one roof is going to have a direct benefit for patients.
My lab is interested in melanoma,
a potentially deadly form of skin cancer.
We try to understand the basic biology of the disease,
and then use that information to improve patient care.
I guess what drives me is what's happening in the hospitals:
the fact that, still, 2000 people are dying every year of melanoma,
and we've had very little impact on that over a 40 year period.
We're just starting to see a new era of melanoma,
where we've got new treatments that are actually working,
some of them are effecting cures, some of them are not.
But it tells us that this is a disease that can be broken.
One of the goals that I would like to see achieved
is that we'll be able to treat patients with small cell lung cancer
with therapies far better than they currently experience.
I'd like to think that the new research that we've been driving forward
based on circulating tumour cells
will bear fruit in the very near future.
And we can then move straight from the work we do in the laboratory
to clinical trials at The Christie for patients with small cell lung cancer,
with the objective of actually providing treatments that will allow patients to live longer
and live with a happier lifestyle.
I'm really looking forward to being at the new MCRC building,
because we're training the next generation of scientists,
and they're being trained by the world leaders in cancer research.
And you're also in a clinical based setting, so that will obviously enhance your research.
The new MCRC building will bring us together with other people who are interested in perhaps different problems,
but tackling it from another angle.
It's a tremendous opportunity,
and there are probably very few places in the world that you could actually do that.
This centre, and the vibrancy of energising each of those interactions,
I'm sure will drive us forward into new horizons
that will place us at the forefront of cancer both nationally and internationally.
In the UK alone,
over 300,000 people are diagnosed with cancer every year.
It's a big problem,
because essentially we live longer.
So there's a huge challenge ahead of us,
and the only way that we're going to meet this challenge,
is through more research.
And it's places like the Manchester Cancer Research Centre
that are really going to trailblaze
We need to bring scientists, clinicians together,
on one site, really interacting with each other,
so can really take discovery right through to clinical practice.