The Centre for Advanced Cancer Therapies (ACT)
Shown are the images of normal breast breast acini (right) and ducts (left bottom) and infiltrative lobular breast carcinoma (left top). Fluorescence staining technique OmniFluorBrigth (OFB) developed by ACT PI Professor Laszlo Szekely
Visions and Goals
To generate scientific discoveries that can be rapidly translated into the clinic for the benefit of patients and society.
- Establish efficient, innovative, and targeted approaches to treat cancer
- Develop novel methods and strengthen existing technical platforms
- Train the next generation of experimental and clinical researchers at different stages of their career
Strategic Recruitment and Renewal
ACT efficiently promotes young, talented scientists and has successfully recruited four junior researchers including three Assistant Professors and one Researcher/Senior Assistant Professor, all with unique and complementary skills. ACT is are in the process of recruiting clinical researcher to the Centre, with the experience in pharmacology/cancer biology as a coordinator of innovative clinical trials, who will promote the transition of promising investigational drugs into clinical trials and assist towards establishing new clinical trials of repositioned drugs.
Infrastructure
We have set up a new infrastructure in the form of technical platforms for key functions such as:
- Screening of chemical libraries and imaging-based validation of hits in clinical samples
- Multi-variant analysis of the response to candidate drugs in clinical samples, using systems biology
- Chemical biology
- Mouse models
Integration of Research Groups
- Participating groups are already working together in 18 collaborative projects
- We have established a formalized system for close interactions between all researchers within the Centre. This involves monthly research seminars and project meetings, as well as an annual retreat.
Research
We are using a multidisciplinary approach that integrates clinical research with state of the art HTP screening of chemical libraries and target identification/validation technologies, including cell and molecular biology, transcriptomics, proteomics, computational biology and in vivo imaging techniques. We have a number of projects at different stages of drug discovery from identification of hits by screening chemical libraries all the way to clinical trials of identified compounds. Many of these projects show promising results and the centre is well set to fulfil its visions.
