Queen Mary research team heads discovery of a new method to stop the growth of cancer cells

1 March 2024

The study, a collaboration with the University of Dundee’s Drug Discovery Unit and funded by Barts Charity, found that cells from basal-like breast cancer (BLBC) could be put into a sleep-like state where they were no longer able to divide or cause tumour growth. A second group of molecules called senolytic drugs could then eliminate the cancerous cells.

Professor Bishop, Professor of Senescence and Director of the Queen Mary Phenotypic Screening Facility, said: “At present, the most common treatments for BLBC are surgery and unsophisticated chemotherapy regimens. Consequently, the lack of possible targets for tailored therapies and the aggressive clinical course means that women with BLBC have a particularly poor prognosis. Pro-senescence therapies activate a stable cell cycle arrest halting tumour growth, trigger anti-tumour immune responses and expose cancers to novel treatment regimes called senolyitcs.”

This research utilised high-content imaging to identify the tool molecules from the diversity libraries held by the Drug Discovery Unit at the University of Dundee, which have now been selected by pharmaceutical company ValiRx for further evaluation.

Charlotte Green, Head of Business Development at the University of Dundee’s Drug Discovery Unit, said: “The one-two punch approach has gained lots of interest in recent years but currently there is no clinical precedent, by moving the project forward with ValiRx we are leading the way in translating the research to the clinic.”

BLBC accounts for between 8 and 22% of all cases of breast cancer globally, and has particularly high incidence in women from Black and Southern Asian ethnic groups. Although overall breast cancer deaths continue to fall, women diagnosed with BLBC have particularly poor prognoses.