Our Research Strategy
Our research is focused on optimising radiation therapies to improve patient outcomes, by feeding results into an accelerated clinical translation pipeline.
By sourcing expertise across discovery, translational and clinical research, and cultivating a modern research landscape aimed to spawn new cross-disciplinary interactions, we aim to unlock the full potential of radiotherapy for patient benefit.
The research hub will gather detailed information on three key areas:
• how tumours resist radiation and non-target toxicities
• ways to target tumours more precisely using new radio-sensitizers (DNA repair inhibitors)
• immunotherapy agents.
These will be supported by large-scale data collation, analysis and predictive computation.
Core research themes
Our research spans five core themes:
- Radiation resistance – understanding cancer evolution, stem-like cancer cells, and DNA damage and repair in clinical radiation resistance.
- Radiation combinations – how the tumour microenvironment and immune system affect response to radiotherapy.
- Targeting and technology – advanced radiotherapy techniques, including proton beam therapy, that converge on the tumour for children and young people’s cancers.
- Outcomes and risk predictions – personalising radiotherapy using artificial intelligence, computational models and improved tumour imaging.
- Clinical translation – support the development of innovative scientific research radiotherapy trials to ensure a strong forward and reverse translational element to the above themes.
These draw on national and international multidisciplinary collaboration and modern research methods that build on technological advances and infrastructure investments. Part of our strategy involves supporting individual researchers through seed funding, allowing them to generate preliminary data to set them up to later apply for larger grant bids and initiative cross-disciplinary research.