There’s been a long tradition of Cancer Research in Bradford.
And I’d worked with some of the pharmacologists here
for many years before I came, we published joint papers together.
And then the opportunity came to become Director of a new Institute of Cancer Therapeutics
that they were setting up here and it was an opportunity that was too good to miss.
Then they’ve built the Institute that we’re now sitting in as part of the new direction
they wanted the cancer group to go in. And I came in really to focus what the
group of pharmacologists here did on in-house drug discovery.
I brought some medicinal chemists with me and we set up essentially what we’ve got now,
which is a department or an Institute which focuses on all elements of the drug
discovery process from concept to clinic as I like to say.
The smart bomb is a name given to a new type of agent, of drug, medicine that is only active
in the cancer and is not active in the rest of the body.
And that’s one of the goals of new medicines to treat cancer.
If we can focus the activity of the molecule so that it does no harm to normal tissues,
then that would be a leap forward for type of cancer treatment.
What’s special about the smart bomb in particular is that it actually kills the vasculature
– the blood vessels that supply the tumour. If you think about it, a tumour like any other tissue
requires nutrient to survive. The nutrients and oxygen are supplied by the
blood vessels that actually the tumour has taken over from normal tissue encourages blood vessels
from normal tissues to grow towards it – that’s how tumour survive.
So if we destroy that blood supply, then you cut off the nutrient and the tumour itself will die.
I hope that the Bradford Crocus Cancer Appeal
is very successful because cancer is something that affects most of humanity now.
It’s one of the second biggest killers. This has run for about 18 months, it took the form
of many newspaper articles, local events that the Telegraph and Argus organised
and the University organised. There are various clubs, such as the Rotary Club
who got involved. It was just a phenomenal activity whereby
students at the University, staff at the University, the general public – all got behind the
appeal in a really very exceptional way. It’s been a wonderful experience for us
at the Institute, because it’s been not just about them raising the money, but raising
awareness of what we do at the institute here at the University of Bradford in cancer research,
specifically what we do for the development of the new cancer medicines.
And I think it’s true to say that the general public within the Bradford area are much more
aware now of our contribution, than they were previous to the appeal.
I would say that we are unique in Yorkshire that under one roof we have all the element
of the cancer drug discovery process: from drug design, from drug synthesis, understanding
how drugs work in the body and essentially how to formulate them, and in partnership
with clinicians at the local hospitals and in Leeds the development of those molecules
into a clinical environment.