Heads Up
The head and neck cancer research charity
Heads-
© 2010 Heads Up
About Heads Up
HNC Research
Calling all cyclists and cricket fans!
Click Here.
Click Here.
Getting new head & neck cancer drugs faster
Head and neck cancers (HNC) are a group of potentially devastating diseases, and many affected patients could benefit greatly from the availability of new, potent drugs for their treatments. However, like numerous other cancer types, HNC are rarely on the mind of commercial drug developers, which prefer to hunt for ‘block busters’ with sales figures of many billion £ per year and are therefore primarily keen to develop new treatments for lung, breast, prostate or colon cancers.
So how can we change this?
One way we try to do this in the HNC research group at the Weatherall Institute of Molecular Medicine in Oxford is by keeping in close contact with academic clinicians that test novel drug candidates in clinical trials. Usually, these trials take a few years, starting with ‘phase I’ small scale investigations that may include as little as 20 patients diagnosed with very different types of tumours. These early trials are primarily aimed at finding the right dose for future, more large-scale trials.
By obtaining access to the new drug candidates at this very early stage, we are able to test them in the laboratory, initially on our large panel of head and neck cancer cell lines, to determine if some of the lines, or even most of them, respond to a particular new drug candidate. If a striking effect is detected, we communicate our results to the oncologists through research seminars and other, informal interactions to encourage them to include HNC patients into trials early on. We further strengthen our ties with the clinical trials unit by supporting the development of new assays to monitor the biological effects of drugs in trials on patients, where possible again using our HNC cell line panel as a starting point for assay developments.
We believe that the speedy introduction of new cancer drugs for HNC critically depends on the close collaboration of basic researchers and clinicians, as well as on the crucial financial support coming from charities like Heads Up.
To find out more about how to support our research please click here.
So how can we change this?
One way we try to do this in the HNC research group at the Weatherall Institute of Molecular Medicine in Oxford is by keeping in close contact with academic clinicians that test novel drug candidates in clinical trials. Usually, these trials take a few years, starting with ‘phase I’ small scale investigations that may include as little as 20 patients diagnosed with very different types of tumours. These early trials are primarily aimed at finding the right dose for future, more large-
By obtaining access to the new drug candidates at this very early stage, we are able to test them in the laboratory, initially on our large panel of head and neck cancer cell lines, to determine if some of the lines, or even most of them, respond to a particular new drug candidate. If a striking effect is detected, we communicate our results to the oncologists through research seminars and other, informal interactions to encourage them to include HNC patients into trials early on. We further strengthen our ties with the clinical trials unit by supporting the development of new assays to monitor the biological effects of drugs in trials on patients, where possible again using our HNC cell line panel as a starting point for assay developments.
We believe that the speedy introduction of new cancer drugs for HNC critically depends on the close collaboration of basic researchers and clinicians, as well as on the crucial financial support coming from charities like Heads Up.
To find out more about how to support our research please click here.