My Breakthrough
Developing personalised treatments for breast cancer
Breakthrough’s Research Centre has its own, highly skilled team of scientists dedicated to drug development – creating new, tailored drugs specifically for treating breast cancer. The team, called the Drug Target Discovery Team, is led by Dr Spiros Linardopoulos. Dr Linardopoulos gained expertise in drug development whilst working for a pharmaceutical company in California. Since joining Breakthrough, he has been using this knowledge to lead his team in developing new breast cancer treatments.
“I feel very positive about the direction that breast cancer treatment is moving in,” says Dr Linardopoulos. “We are now moving from an era of general ‘one size fits all’ anti-cancer drugs, which can have lots of side effects, to an era of personalised drugs which have fewer side effects and can be more effective.”
A huge amount of hard work by our scientists goes into developing these new, tailored treatments. There are several different stages involved in the process, each of which is essential to ensure that only the safest and most effective drugs are ever used to treat patients.
"We are now moving from an era of general ‘one size fits all’ anti-cancer drugs, which can have lots of side effects, to an era of personalised drugs which have fewer side effects and can be more effective."
Dr Linardopoulos
So just how do scientists go about developing tailored treatments for breast cancer? The first thing that they do is to look for potential drug ‘targets’. This often means identifying molecules that help cancer cells to grow and survive, because if these can be blocked, the cancer cells should die. Next, scientists test thousands of different chemicals, looking for one or more that are able to specifically block the drug target. Once a promising chemical has been identified, a team of chemists set to work to make improvements to it. For example, they make sure that it only blocks the target molecule – this is important for making a drug safe and minimising any side effects. After this, scientists carry out tests to see if the chemical effectively kills cancer cells and tumours grown in the laboratory. If successful, it can be taken forward for testing in clinical trials.
Dr Linardopoulos is responsible for overseeing two different research teams. The first is the Drug Target Discovery Team, based at the Breakthrough Research Centre. This team devises and carries out innovative experiments to discover ‘targets’ in cancer cells that could be exploited for the development of new drugs. The second team is based at Cancer Research UK’s Centre for Cancer Therapeutics in Sutton. Here, painstaking work is done to find and alter chemicals so that they are suitable for use as drugs. These two teams complement one another perfectly, and their combined efforts have enabled them to make fantastic progress in designing, creating and refining targeted breast cancer treatments.
It usually takes five to seven years of scientific research between finding a drug target and developing a treatment that can be tested in patients in clinical trials. “Once a potential drug reaches clinical trials, it’s out of our hands,” explains Dr Linardopoulos. “Doctors in the hospitals are responsible for overseeing the trials. We scientists just wait excitedly to see how well the treatment works for patients.” It usually takes an additional three to five years for a potential drug to be thoroughly tested in clinical trials, before it can be licensed and then assessed to see if it can be used in the NHS.
The hard work put in by Dr Linardopoulos and his team is paying off: “Excitingly, we now have a promising-looking drug that is very close to entering the clinical trials stage. We’re also working on several other treatments that are in earlier stages of development.”
The potential drug closest to entering clinical trials is called CCT129202. This achievement represents the culmination of several years’ work for Dr Linardopoulos and his dedicated team. The drug blocks a cancer-causing molecule called Aurora-A, and has proven successful at killing cancer cells and tumours grown in the laboratory.
The team, in collaboration with another team led by Professor Alan Ashworth (Director of the Breakthrough Research Centre), has also been working on blocking a target called PPM1D. Between 11–16% of early breast cancers produce high levels of this protein, and this may help the cancer cells to grow and survive. Encouragingly, the scientists have found a chemical that specifically reduces the growth of cancer cells that produce too much PPM1D, but does not affect other cells. The next step will be to fine-tune this chemical before carrying out further laboratory tests.
“It’s very exciting that at Breakthrough we now have all the know-how and the resources we need to develop new drugs ourselves,” enthuses Dr Linardopoulos. “Although Breakthrough is relatively small, we have been able to accomplish a huge amount with what we have.”
We are immensely proud of what Breakthrough’s scientists are achieving. It is because of the dedication of research teams such as the Drug Target Discovery Team that we can hope for a better future for women diagnosed with breast cancer.
