POWERFUL NEW drug treatments for cancer are expected from an Irish initiative that involves some of the country’s top cancer researchers.
It will develop promising new “smart bomb” drugs that specifically target cancer cells while leaving normal tissues unaffected.
The “strategic research cluster” will involve academic and company partners and State support worth €5.6 million.
Research partners will produce designer drugs against cancer and be able to take them through to human clinical trials, according to the consultant medical oncologist who will lead it, Prof John Crown.
The new Strategic Research Cluster in Molecular Therapeutics for Cancer will be based at Dublin City University and include partners in University College Dublin, the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland and Trinity College Dublin.
Minister of State for Science, Technology and Innovation Conor Lenihan announced details of the cluster yesterday in Dublin. “There has been a radical change in our approach to cancer drug development and it is accelerating now,” Prof Crown said.
While general purpose chemotherapy had greatly improved cancer outcomes, particularly in childhood leukaemia, it was poorly targeted and “largely a development of the chemical weapons industry”, he said.
Advances in cellular and molecular technologies have enabled scientists to look at the inner workings of individual cells.
Direct comparisons between what happens inside a healthy cell could now be compared with what happens inside a cancerous cell, he said. “The science has got better and the technology has got better and there is a raft of drugs under study.”
The idea was to produce “molecular drugs” he said, anti-cancer therapies that worked specifically on cancer cells by interfering with the way they divide and grow.
These new drugs would be “smart bombs instead of blunderbusses”, Prof Crown stated.
The cluster will pull together the academic institutions and some of the biggest pharmaceutical companies in the world and also Irish drug developers including GlaxoSmithKline, Pfizer, Merck Sharpe Dohme, Novartis, Roche, Amgen, Erigal, Caliper Life Science and AntiCancer Inc. This will allow a “joined-up approach” to drug development, Prof Crown said.
“This is what the agreement is all about. It will allow us to hire 26 young researchers to take on projects in studying targeted drugs for cancer.”
Initially the companies will provide drugs for study, but the cluster’s “holy grail” was to create wholly new chemical compounds based on detailed molecular studies of cancer cells, he said.
Any new therapy could then be brought forward to human trials via the Irish Clinical Oncology Research Group, which Prof Crown helped found.
Mr Lenihan said the cluster had genuine potential to make Ireland a leading centre for cancer drug discovery and development.