Tenovus Cancer Care joined forces with the Life Sciences Research Network Wales to showcase the very latest advances in the fight against cancer.

Experts from across the UK met at the Life Sciences Hub at Cardiff Bay to discuss the very latest advancements in cancer research to an audience which included PhD students funded by Tenovus Cancer Care, key supporters of the charity and Deputy Health Minister Vaughan Gething AM.

Among the speakers were Hugh Griffiths, whose work with Professor Chris McGuigan has led to the development of Acelarin, which is helping to control the spread of solid tumours in cancer patients.

Professor McGuigan, Chair of Life Sciences Research Network Wales and the Life Sciences Hub Wales, and inventor of Acelarin, said: “At the National Research Network, we are proud to work with Tenovus in bringing better drugs forward to improve the treatment of cancer in patients across Wales, and beyond,”

Each year Tenovus Cancer Care invests nearly £0.5 million across 20 PhD projects making us one of the largest supporters of early career researchers and scientists in Wales. We are also pleased to announce that starting this October we will be investing a further £900,000 in 10 PhD studentships based at Cardiff, Swansea and Bangor Universities.

This year Tenovus Cancer Care has partnered with the Life Sciences Research Network (LSRN) to jointly support a PhD studentship in cancer drug development.

These studentships span a breadth of cancer research areas, including drug development, immunotherapy, cancer genetics and prostate cancer treatment choices.

Dr Ian Lewis, Director of Research at Tenovus Cancer Care, said: “Wales is at the forefront of some really exciting developments in cancer research. We are really proud to be working with the Life Sciences Research Network to support this PhD studentship, which will help us develop new drugs to combat cancer.”

Deputy Health Minister Vaughan Gething AM added: “We have made real progress in improving cancer care in Wales – more people than ever now survive cancer, even though more people are being diagnosed.”

“The work of Tenovus is a fantastic example of how the third sector and NHS Wales work together to meet the needs of patients. My hope is such ongoing collaboration can continue to support society’s wider efforts to tackle the burden of cancer on individuals and the health service.”

Cardiff University’s European Cancer Stemcell Research Institute, Velindre NHS Trust and Cancer Research UK  will be holding a Cancer Research Open Day on Saturday 24^th October at the Hadyn Ellis Building, Maindy Road (posters attached).

This public event will showcase the diverse, cutting-edge cancer research taking place across Cardiff and attendees from across Wales are welcome. The event is aimed primarily at members of the public but visitors will meet cancer scientists, doctors and nurses, go behind the scenes on lab tours, learn about local research through talks and interactive demos and create some biological artwork with local textile artist, Lisa Porch.

Attendance is free and visitors can register their interest at https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/cardiff-cancer-research-open-day-2015-tickets-18114580197.

For further information please see the attached posters.

Cancer research open day 2015 poster Welsh

Cancer research open day 2015 poster English

£10m to conserve antibiotics for future generations

Thursday 24th September

18:00-20:00, Life Sciences Hub, 3 Assembly Square, Cardiff. Wales. CF10 4PL

Refreshments will be provided

Nesta and Life Sciences Hub Wales would like to invite you to come and find out more about the £10m Longitude Prize’s fascinating 300-year history, last year’s BBC Horizon vote and what you need to do to win the Prize.
The Longitude Prize is a historic challenge that aims to conserve antibiotics for future generation. The challenge is to develop a cheap, accurate, rapid and easy-to-use, point-of-care test that will identify when antibiotics are needed and, if they are, which ones to use.

The Longitude Prize was opened last year and will run until December 2019 or until a winner is found.

Find out more about how to win the Longitude Prize – sign up now

The event will be hosted by Adam Price

You will hear from:

Dr Tracey Cooper

Chief Executive – Public Health Wales

Professor Chris Butler

Professor of Primary Care Medicine and Longitude Prize Judging Panel member

Professor Jim McLaughlin OBE

Professor in the University of Ulster School of Engineering & Chief Technology Officer – Zensor

Reserve your place now

Cardiff University are looking to support a number of research projects through innovative crowdfunding company FutSci. Crowdfunding, in its simplest form, is a way of raising funds by asking a large number of people to contribute a relatively small amount of money. Futsci specialises in funding biomedical research through crowdfunding and provide the opportunity for individual to support specific research projects.

For more information, please visit their website, https://www.futsci.com

Anti Microbial Resistance

Antimicrobial resistance is a growing public health issue that threatens to undermine the treatment of an increasing range of infections caused by bacteria, viruses and fungi. Many of the most commonly used antimicrobials are becoming less effective with bacteria, viruses and fungi naturally adapting and becoming increasingly resistant to medicines used to treat the infections they cause.

This is a global problem that the Work Economic Forum and World Health Organisation have both identified as a major public health problem.

The issue has also been raised by the UK’s Chief Medical Officer and resulted in the Department of Health releasing a Five Year Antimicrobial Resistance Strategy (2013-18).

Academics from across Wales have a long track record of research into antimicrobial resistance and are working together to address key challenges in the following areas:

Alternative Approaches to Treating Bacterial Infection
Development of Novel Therapeutics
Development of Diagnostic Devices.
The consortium includes members from the following Welsh universities:

Aberystwyth, Bangor, Cardiff and Swansea.

If you are interested in joining the forum or finding out more, please email us nrn@cardiff.ac.uk

The Network has recently awarded the following Round 3 Research Projects and Studentships:

Research Projects:

Dr Gwenin, A rapid point of care system to manage/monitor drug treatment in therapeutically relevant mycobacterial infections

Prof O’Donnell, Development of new prothrombotic lipids for haemostatic applications

Prof Hall, Investigating the potential of the sphingosine-1-phosphate receptor 1 modulators for the treatment of psychiatric disorders.

Prof Piguet, Anti-viral activity of ProTide derivatives on human T cells

Dr Rozanowska, Novel modulators of the visual cycle for treatment of retinal degenerations

Dr Kidd, Investigating a novel therapy for Alzheimer’s disease in a mouse model of amyloid pathology

Dr Clarkson, Sensitizing to radiotherapy: ore-clinical evaluation of a novel indication for adjuvant bcl3i

Prof Dale, Establishing a screen for the WNT-STOP mitotic signalling pathway

Prof Wilkinson, Expression and activity determination of novel cloned antibiofilm peptides

Dr Westwell, Advancing analogues of a novel cFLIP inhibitor which sensitises breast cancer cells and cancer stem cells to TRAIL

Studentships:

Dr Heard, Towards the repurposing existing of topical antimicrobials by ligand complexation.

Prof Hoffmann, Repositioning histone methyltransferase inhibitors as next generation anthelmintics.

Prof Mur, Exploiting natural products from Hops (Humulus lupulus) to suppress tuberculosis.

Prof Sheldon, Manipulation of squalene synthase to limit bacterial infections.

Dr Howell, Treating Progressive Multiple Sclerosis Using A Novel Neuroprotective And Anti-Inflammatory approach.

Dr Del Sol, Companion diagnostic development guides Antibody-Drug Conjugate formulation: Implications for patient stratification and precision medicine.

Dr Cai, Combining carbon monoxide (CO)-releasing molecules with anti-VEGF therapy for triple-negative breast cancer therapy.

Prof Doak, Design and evaluation of an antibody-drug conjugate for prostate cancer treatment.

Prof Brophy, Towards validation of an immune suppressor protein from liver fluke as a drug target.

Prof Triantafilou, Peptides derived from Yersinia pestis V antigen as novel therapeutic interventions for sepsis.

Prof Doak, Mechanistic evaluation of the impact of superparamagnetic iron oxide nanoparticles conjugated with drugs (SPIONd) on intracellular signalling/homeostatic mechanisms.

Dr Creevey, Computational approaches to mining the rumen micro biome for novel antimicrobials.

Dr Gwenin, Testing a novel chemotherapy delivery system using two dinitrobenzamide mustard prodrugs.

The AMR cross-council initiative has launched a new call under theme  2 –  “Accelerating therapeutic and diagnostic development”.

MRC, BBSRC, EPSRC, and ESRC are supporting this call and the MRC is managing it on behalf of the funding partners.

The focus of the call is to:

• Refresh the pipeline for human and animal antibiotics;
• Develop new non-drug based treatments for bacterial infections (vaccines, immunotherapies, probiotics, prebiotics, phages, amongst others);
• Improve the efficacy of existing drugs through effective dosing strategies to minimise development of resistance and/or develop more targeted delivery methods;
• Accelerate the scale-up and manufacture of novel antibiotics and vaccines;
• Underpin the development of rapid, point of care diagnostics to enable the most appropriate therapy/intervention to be chosen;
• Develop innovative diagnostics data linkages for community settings to monitor spread; and
• Consider the real world issues that will affect the development and utilisation of new treatments and diagnostics

Partnership between industry and academia is actively encouraged under this initiative.

The call has two funding modes:

• Collaborative grants – ~£3m each for 4-5 years, multidisciplinary in nature across more than one research organisation
• Innovative grants – ~£200k each over 12-24 months, highly innovative, high risk/high gain

Deadline for submission is 4 June 2015.

Please circulate widely to your communities and direct them to this webpage:

http://www.mrc.ac.uk/funding/browse/tackling-amr-theme-2-accelerating-therapeutic-and-diagnostics-development/

For queries:

MRC: Ghada Zoubiane / Ruth Kelly amr@headoffice.mrc.ac.uk

BBSRC: Sian Rowland: amr@bbsrc.ac.uk

EPSRC: Victoria Marlow: healthcare@epsrc.ac.uk

ESRC: Naomi Beaumont: Naomi.Beaumont@esrc.ac.uk