Cambridge varsity, India tie up for cancer drugs

Moving beyond academic and business relations, Cambridge University will work with India to develop new drugs to treat cancer and other deadly diseases.

Moving beyond academic and business relations, Cambridge University will work with India to develop new drugs to treat cancer and other deadly diseases.

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In an interview with HT, Cambridge University vice-chancellor Leszek Borysiewicz said: “In a single human cell, there are 200,000 possible targets where drugs could be used. At present, very few targets have been identified. Our aim is to identify the missing 190,000 targets for which there are no drugs.”

The joint research will be done at the Centre for Chemical Biology and Therapeutics (CCBT), which will be inaugurated on September 17 at the National Centre for Biological Science and in STEM campus at Bangalore.

The integrated multidisciplinary research centre is designed to pioneer new approaches to create small-molecule tools that target novel classes of targets and aims to develop new scientific approaches for the treatment of diseases.

Researchers will aspire to combine methods from genetics, chemistry, cell biology, biochemistry and imaging to understand the alterations in cellular systems and identify ways to correct those using drugs.