Radiotherapy activated materials for enhanced cancer treatments

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Cancer remains one of the most significant causes of mortality worldwide, with 8.2 million deaths and 14.1 million new cases reported in 2012 alone (World Health Organization, 2012: http://www.who.int/mediacentre/factsheets/fs297/en/), and a cost to the EU of 126 billion Euros in 2009. Chemotherapy is currently a major approach for treating cancer but a continuing concern is the inability to deliver therapeutic doses of drug directly to cancer cells without affecting normal cells. A new generation of medicines is needed to address the current shortcomings and to target complexities associated with differing cancer types, disease progression and tumour anatomies. The focus of this project is triple negative breast cancer (TNBC) which affects 12% of the 1.4 million newly-diagnosed breast cancer cases each year. There are very limited treatment options for TNBC because this form of cancer does not express any of the three biomarkers that are targeted by current therapies (including drugs such as Herceptin). For this Fellowship project we target TNBC with new chemotherapeutics which have been specifically designed to operate alongside radiotherapy, to exploit some changes in biology which occur during and after radiation damage. It is estimated that ~ 60% of cancer patients will receive radiotherapy, yet to date, chemotherapeutics have rarely been designed to recognise this clinical fact. The project will therefore explore a new and powerful means to combine radiation and chemistry to target cells which would otherwise evade therapy.