In partnership with Evotec, a drug discovery company, Associate Professor Deborah Goberdhan has received a LAB282 award of half a million pounds to screen for inhibitors of proteins that selectively promote cancer growth.
This award builds on over fifteen years of work, initiated and undertaken in Oxford, on the amino acid regulation of the growth-regulating kinase complex mTORC1 by so-called ‘transceptors’, proteins that look like transporters, but actually sense amino acids.
Prof Goberdhan commented: "We have taken this work forward translationally with an outstanding group of clinical collaborators in Oxford, facilitated by the Cancer Research UK Oxford Centre. We have also identified other putative regulators of cancer growth and progression, which we plan to develop in a similar way."