There are currently 9 breast cancer clinical trials open in Ireland (run by ICORG, www.icorg.ie) – St Vincent’s are participating in all of these trials
- In addition to supporting the clinical trials team at St Vincent’s, CCRT also supports lab research in St Vincent’s, UCD, RCSI and DCU.
- The Caroline Foundation supports a senior scientist, Norma O’Donovan, at Dublin City University. Dr O’Donovan is supervising a team of 9 cancer researchers at the National Institute for Cellular Biotechnology, DCU (4 of the 9 are funded partly/fully by CCRT, www.ccrt.ie) – the team includes postgraduate students, postdoctoral scientists and a research assistant.
- The focus of the research is on developing new targeted therapies for cancer and identifying biomarkers to help determine which drugs will benefit individual patients. For example, by studying how tumour cells become resistant to current therapies they can identify new targets and test new treatments that may overcome drug resistance. The group are currently testing 6 new drugs in breast cancer cells in the lab and performing biomarker tests on patient samples from 2 breast cancer clinical trials. The drugs which produce the most promising results in the lab will be progressed into clinical trials in breast cancer patients.
Dr Norma O’Donovan
