Midland universities to develop cancer and cardiovascular drugs

Birmingham and Nottingham University will team up to use new imaging techniques to research treatments for cardiovascular disease and cancer.

The research will take place at the Centre of Membrane Proteins and Receptors (COMPARE), and has been launched with an initial £10m investment. The Centre will use a recent development in imaging techniques – Super Resolution Microscopy – to help them better understand how drugs bind to either a protein or cell surface receptor.

Professor Sir David Eastwood, Vice-Chancellor of Birmingham University, said: “This significant £10million collaborative project, demonstrates the power of leading universities working together to tackle global issues such as cardiovascular disease and cancer. The launch of COMPARE signals a new chapter in the signature collaboration between the universities of Birmingham and Nottingham and I am confident we will achieve ever more remarkable things during our next five years of partnership.”

Other innovations will be also used to enable researchers to study drug-receptor and protein-protein interactions at a single molecule resolution. Part of the research will involve searching for a receptor for Vascular Endothelial Growth Factor (VEGF) as it controls the growth of blood vessels that supply cancerous tumours.  Current medical treatments that target this receptor to prevent blood vessel growth also cause high blood pressure.

Stephen Hill, Professor of Molecular Pharmacology at the School of Life Sciences at Nottingham University, said: “The phenomenal microscopy infrastructure that is required for a project of this scale is now beyond the capability of a single institution. Through our partnership with Birmingham we have the ability to put into place a regional centre with a unique focus that will rival existing centres in other areas of the UK, including Cambridge and London.”

We want to use our technology to visualise at the single molecule level whether there are subtle local differences in the way VEGF acts on the receptors involved in cancer progression and those concerned with regulating blood pressure with an aim to designing a new generation of drugs that only hit the cancer,” he said.