Dr Matt Smalley Spearheads Institute’s Involvement with EU Agenda

A review article by the EU Innovative Medicines Initiative (IMI) funded consortium PREDECT has recently been published, which outlines a project that aims to identify what are the best pre-clinical models for testing new anti-cancer drugs in breast, prostate and lung cancer.

PREDECT is an industry-academia partnership involving nine academic labs, three SMEs and nine pharmaceutical company partners from across Europe. One of its aims is to create more appropriate in vitro platforms for target validation and drug discovery.

Deputy Director, Dr Matt Smalley represents the European Cancer Stem Cell Research Institute and Cardiff University within the Consortium and contributed to the paper Three dimensional models of cancer for pharmacology and cancer cell biology: Capturing tumor complexity in vitro/ex vivo.

He explains:- "Our project aims to identify what are the best pre-clinical models for testing new anti-cancer drugs in breast, prostate and lung cancer. By best, I mean those which, when treated with a drug, will respond most similarly to how a tumour in a patient would respond. By identifying the pre-clinical models which behave most like tumours in patients we will be able to better predict which drugs should go forward into clinical trials and reduce the number of unsuccessful trials. The review discusses those models the Consortium is currently testing."