Oxford’s Experimental Cancer Medicine Centre (ECMC) aims to accelerate the development of new cancer treatments, with a scientific focus on RNA biology, DNA damage processing, and immunotherapy. It also delivers programmes of concurrent clinical and biomarker research designed to stratify patients to ensure that the right cancer treatments are offered to the patients who are most likely to benefit.
This news follows the announcement earlier this year that Cancer Research UK and the National Institute for Health and Care Research are to invest £3 million into the Centre over the next five years. Professor Parkes will lead the Centre’s drive to increase the use of patient-derived data to inform decision-making in early phase trials and to develop new research hypotheses. The Centre will continue to explore novel, experimental treatments, focusing on immunotherapies and drugs targeted at RNA biology, for a wide variety of cancers, as well as working on improving existing therapies.