EACR 2016
The changing process of drug discovery and design
Dr Ian Waddell - Cancer Research UK Manchester Institute, Manchester, UK
We work in drug discovery so we’re currently working on targeted therapies in lung cancer, breast cancer and we’re beginning to work in pancreatic cancer.
What have you found so far?
Our two lead areas are RET for lung cancer and PARG, which is a DNA repair enzyme, which is involved in breast cancer, BRCA deficient breast cancer.
What are the advantages and disadvantages of targeted therapy?
Everything that we work on is effectively a targeted therapy so the days of drug discovery on non-targeted therapies are over. So everything that we work on we have to be able to describe the patients who would benefit from the therapy that we’re designing which means that we always build in a biomarker right at the very start so that we’re able to describe the patients that would benefit.
Has the rapid fluctuation of targeted therapies made it difficult to keep track of?
I think it’s increasingly hard. So, for example in bladder cancer it’s now very difficult to test because most of the patients are taken up by lots and lots of therapies that are being tested. So it’s going to be increasingly difficult to test them all but I still think targeted therapy is the way forward for drug discovery.
What have been your highlights of the EACR conference?
The highlight, actually today, was a fantastic talk from Dana Farber which was really talking about Project Achilles. That was the thing that probably I learned the most from and the thing that will influence the work that I’m going to do in the future.
Could you tell us more about Project Achilles?
Project Achilles is run out of the Dana Farber and Broad Institute and it’s a very broad omics look at gene expression. The reason it’s of particular interest to us was actually some work they were doing looking at CRISPR studies and the exciting data that was seen today was that CRISPR is not a technique that we can use when genes tend to be amplified. So it’s something to do with the number of cuts that are made in the DNA.
How can we best identify different targets?
That’s the hardest question that you could ask me. The best way is reading the literature but also being out and being collaborative. One of the best things about this event is that we get to network with people, talk about collaborations and talk about the exciting research that they’re doing.
