MRC/CR-UK Gray Institute for Radiation Oncology and Biology, Oxford - MRC Core Grant

Radiation therapy is one of the most commonly used ways to treat cancer. More than 50% of all patients with cancer will receive radiation as part of their treatment. For reasons we do not completely understand radiation is much more effective for treating some kinds of cancer than others. We are trying to understand why it is that some cancers do not respond to treatment. If we can understand what causes some kinds of cancer to fail to respond we may be able to come up with ways to make the treatment more effective. We believe that we may be able to identify some genes that are active in resistant cancers that if we could turn the genes off, or come up with a drug that would interfere with how the gene works, that would then cause the cancer to be more easily cured with radiation. For example radiation causes damage to the DNA in cancer cells but some kinds of cancer are very good at repairing the damage that the radiation causes so they can survive high doses of radiation. If we could interfere with the way the cancer repairs the damage it might make the cancer more sensitive to radiation and would make it easier for us to cure the patient. This is an example of the kind of things this proposal will study.

This is a proposal to unite newly-recruited research teams with existing groups from the MRC Radiation and Genome Stability Unit (RAGSU) at Harwell and the Gray Cancer Institute (GCI) at Mount Vernon in a new initiative in Radiation Oncology and Biology at Oxford. The rationale is to create a world class centre for radiobiology research that will specifically aim to move in a clinical and translational direction. To do this the proposed radiobiology initiative will draw on existing strengths within the RAGSU and GCI centres and will strategically recruit new personnel to supplement those strengths in ways that will facilitate translational research. The proposed initiative will complement rather than duplicate existing strengths at Oxford University and elsewhere in the UK. This initiative will attempt to return UK radiation biology to the prominent international role that it once held in influencing the direction of research in clinical oncology. Achieving these goals will require more than just facilities and resources, it will require a strategy to select areas of research that are most likely to lead to advances in translational research on a relatively short, 5 ? 10 year, timetable.