The Clinical Pharmacology and Trials Group is responsible for the study of the preclinical and clinical pharmacology, and for the early clinical trials, of new anti-cancer agents developed in the Centre for Cancer Drug Discovery.
Such investigations may include the study of mechanisms of action and resistance, toxicology, pharmacokinetics, early dose-finding studies and the development of pharmacodynamic biomarkers for the measurement of drug action in tumour and surrogate tissues. These may be molecular assays or functional imaging studies. The emphasis is increasingly on hypothesis-testing clinical trials of agents acting on new molecular targets including cell signalling, cell survival, the cell cycle control machinery, chromatin modulation and angiogenesis.
The Drug Metabolism and Pharmacokinetics (DMPK) Group (led by Dr Florence Raynaud), within the Clinical Pharmacology and Trials Group, is a multidisciplinary group studying the pharmacokinetics of anti-cancer drugs in clinical trials. The group helps to characterise and prioritise the best drugs to enter the clinic: once in clinical trials, the group conducts and analyses pharmacokinetic data crucial to make go/no-go decisions, as well as decisions on optimal doses and schedules of novel anti-cancer drugs.
The Clinical Pharmacodynamic Biomarker Group works with drug discovery groups to transfer assays used in drug discovery to platforms that can be used to assay human tissue sampled during clinical trials.
Aims