Prof Gillies McKenna to head new world-leading cancer research centre

Professor Gillies McKenna, Fellow at Wolfson College and Professor of Radiation Oncology and Biology will head a new world-leading £138m centre for targeted cancer. The centre will research, develop, test and implement personalised treatments, diagnosis, imaging and therapy. The project will be a partnership with the Oxford University Hospitals NHS Trust, Cancer Research UK, Synergy Health, Roche Diagnostics and GE Healthcare.

Professor McKenna said, ‘This will be a fully comprehensive cancer centre for research involving patients with early-stage cancer.

‘Potential new cancer drugs have traditionally been first tried out in patients with end-stage disease and results are often disappointing. Even when responses are seen the responses are often quite brief. We want instead to look at how new drug candidates might be combined with the latest surgery or radiotherapy techniques, still the mainstays of curative cancer treatment. We also want to develop new ways for imaging cancer so that imaging can be used to select and monitor treatment to be able to tell very quickly whether the right treatment has been selected.

‘We hope this new approach could see a change in how new treatments are developed for cancer, by combining them with the best available curative treatments.'

The second project approved for funding is a new centre for drug target discovery and for research based on medical data sets. Bringing together academia, industry and the Oxford University Hospitals NHS Trust, with capability to analyse massive medical datasets, it will help deliver improved medicines, better health care, and economic growth from UK's life sciences.

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