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Unblocking the cancer drug development bottleneck via innovative partnering


Cancer Research UK & the Centre for Drug Development

Cancer Research UK (CRUK) is the world’s largest independent cancer research charity, funding almost GB£350 million of research across all tumor types during 2014/2015 [1]. The CRUK Centre for Drug Development (CDD) aims to take promising clinical drug candidates from academic sources and commercial partners into early-phase clinical trials with a key strategic focus on translating from preclinical candidate to first-time-in-human studies. Uniquely within the not-for-profit sector, the CDD is supported by two good manufacturing practice licensed facilities manufacturing small molecule and biological investigational medicinal products – the CRUK Formulation Unit and the CRUK Biotherapeutic Development Unit. The CDD currently consists of a team of around 80 scientific and clinical operations staff that manages a portfolio of approximately 25 active drug development projects. Since inception in the early 1980s as the Cancer Research Campaign Phase I/II Committee, the CDD has tested over 120 potential cancer medicines in early-phase clinical trials, five of which have gone onto become registered cancer medicines.

Click here to view the full article in Future Oncology.