Advanced Cancer Models and Therapeutics Group

Developing novel Immunotherapeutic approaches to cancer using advanced physiological disease models and spatial biological approaches.

Utilising our cross-disciplinary team spanning cancer biologists, surgeon-scientists, engineers and spatial biologists, our group focusses on difficult to treat cancers. We achieve this through the development of human cancer model systems, cutting edge spatial biology and the development of novel therapeutics.

Cancer Model Systems (Gordon-Weeks/Fisher)

A perfect cancer model system is entirely human, incorporates the plethora of cell types found with tissues and includes a physiological route for drug delivery. Current systems fail on one and sometimes all of these parameters and failure to develop systems that faithfully recapitulate human cancer biology now provides a bottle neck to successful therapeutic design. Our model systems range from organ-on-chip microfluidic systems, through tissue avatars all the way to whole organ perfusion platforms enabling delivery of therapeutics coupled with pre- and post-treatment tissue analysis. We will use these systems to uncover mechanisms of inherent immune evasion, therapeutic resistance, to de-risk clinical trials and reduced animal experimentation in cancer research.

Spatial Biology (Gordon-Weeks)

The coupling of AI and advanced imaging techniques is leading to a field change in the way we analyse cancer samples. Spatial biological approaches involve the mapping of multiple cell types across large areas of tissue such that topology and structure can be understood and utilised to describe biological phenomena. The recent addition of whole transcriptome, single cell spatial pipelines is enabling understanding of how the transcriptome of specific cell types changes based on tissue location and proximity with communicating cell types. We utilise these techniques to analyse archived cancer specimens and to interrogate the biological efficacy of therapeutics delivered to our cancer models. This is building a greater understanding of how the cancer manipulates its tissue of origin to evade immune destruction and support disease progression.

Therapeutic Development (Fisher/Seymour)

Scientist who join our group to design or discover new treatments for cancer, are no longer constrained by laboratory models that underrepresent the complex human tumour architecture. The advanced human perfusion models developed by our laboratory enables researchers to consider the entire human tumour microenvironment from vascular supply all the way through to heterogenic populations of cancer embedded in layers of stromal cells and extracellular matrix.

We currently have research projects for therapies deigned to target, modulate or eliminate individual or multiple tumour cell populations using a range of modalities including cells, vectors and bi-specific antibodies. New opportunities will continue to arise as spatial biologists in the group continue uncover new vulnerabilities for the therapeutic team members to exploit.

Alumni from our group have gone on to translate their initial finding into the clinics and we aim to support and training the next generation of translational scientists.