I'm Olivia Rossanese
and I'm Andrea Sottoriva
Welcome to the ICR's new Centre for Cancer Drug Discovery.
In this building we are working to outsmart cancer
with the world's first Darwinian anti-evolution
drug discovery programme.
Our ultimate goal is to overcome cancer evolution
and prevent drug resistance.
The building itself will bring together
almost 300 scientists
from cancer and evolutionary biologists
and chemists
to big data specialists and clinician scientists
united in a shared goal.
This is the area of the building
dedicated to the Centre for Evolution and Cancer
which I direct.
In our centre we focus on
one of the biggest challenges we have
in cancer therapy today
which is the emergence of treatment resistance.
So cancers change over time
and sometimes they become adapted
to current therapies.
So a drug that may work very well
in a first instance stops working.
We study this process
using Darwin's evolutionary principles
with the objective of designing entirely new
treatment schedules and new therapies
that have the aim of blocking or
delaying this process of resistance.
The first two floors of the building
are dedicated to biologists like myself.
This is one of the many tissue culture labs
in the building.
We use these rooms to grow cancer cells
that can then be used in our research.
LeAnne is a PhD student studying in my lab
LeAnne, can you tell us about your work?
I'm looking at some of the different ways
cancer cells become resistant to targeted
anti-cancer agents and chemotherapies.
We know that there are a small number of cancer cells
that are able to survive these treatments
and I'm interested in finding out
why that is.
If we can understand what is different about
these cancer cells
we may be able to identify
novel anti-cancer drug targets
or develop new therapeutic strategies
to prevent them from surviving.
On each floor there's a Collaboration Hub.
These breakout spaces provide a vibrant environment
for scientists to meet
share ideas and come up with creative solutions.
We are going to bring together
scientists developing new cancer drugs
with those studying cancer evolution
for the first time in the same building.
In the Crystallisation Lab
we crystallise our protein cancer targets
and we complex them with our drug molecules.
We in 3D visualise the
protein structure with drug molecule bound
and that gives our chemistry colleagues
a lot of information on how to design better drugs.
To accurately dispense our
crystallisation reagents
we need robotics such as this.
So this is a robot that actually dispenses
our cancer target
and it dispenses it in these wells
together with the general crystallisation reagents
and then after that
we'll seal this plate and store it at a set temperature
and then we wait until the protein crystallises.
Now we have our Structural Biologists
co-located with all of the
Cancer Therapeutics unit's staff
and this helps actually the integration
with our medicinal chemistry colleagues
and it helps our productivity.
So we're here on the second and third floors
of our of new Centre for Cancer Drug Discovery
and a large part of these laboratories are
given over to medicinal chemistry
and the job of a medicinal chemist
is rather like a molecular architect.
We're rearranging and arranging
the atoms into molecular shapes
and trying to sculpt those to fit
into clefts on the proteins
that cause cancer in cancer cells
with the aim of getting something that
stops their cancer causing function
and might be a potential therapy.
We work then obviously in collaboration
with our biology colleagues
on other floors in this building
to test those molecules and see how they behave
and do they really offer a way forward
for treating cancer.
As chemists
we have to develop the new compounds
that hopefully in the future will be the new
drugs for cancer treatment.
I've been in the ICR for 18 years
and since I started we've been
talking about having a new building.
It's a bit like a dream coming true, isn't it.
Our work as Data Scientists
is playing a key role in the process of discovering
targeted treatments for patients with cancer.
We are collecting a huge amount of very complex
clinical data
like genetics, MRI scans and much more.
We are using computational methods
and artificial intelligence algorithms
in order to create molecular maps
for each patient
at the time of the treatment
which is very unique
and these might help researchers here
in the Drug Discovery team
and Cancer Evolution teams
to find drugs that might work
for that specific patient
or hidden molecular targets that others may miss.
The Centre for Cancer Drug Discovery
is a new exciting opportunity
to tackle the problem of cancer drug resistance
head-first.
All of this is possible
due to the generosity
of those who share our vision
to ensure that cancer patients
can be treated long-term
and effectively cured.
It's our aim that through the work undertaken
in The Centre for Cancer Drug Discovery
and with your ongoing support
that we can make difference
and improve the lives of cancer patients everywhere.
Thank you.