It has been shown repeatedly now, by ourselves and others, that treatment with standard chemotherapeutic agents can lead to an increase in the numbers of stem cells, with the implication that the risk of subsequent recurrence or metastasis is increased.
This leads us to propose that combination treatments will be necessary to truly change the way in which cancer is managed - drugs to reduce the size of the tumour mass, combined with drugs to prevent the stem cells regenerating it in future.
Starting in prostate cancer we will develop a pipeline of drug candidates against different targets in the stem cells, addressing the need for multiple treatment options for this heterogeneous disease. We have identified and validated several novel targets and shown that inhibiting them prevents tumour initiation. Our first drug candidate is a monoclonal antibody against one of these targets, which is being developed in our drug development laboratories in Cambridge, UK
