At the ICR we aim to defeat cancer through scientific excellence, innovation and partnership. These principles also underpin our approach to scientific infrastructure, which is among the very best of any research centre in the UK.
At the ICR, you’ll benefit from our continual investment in world-leading scientific services that combine cutting-edge equipment with a highly skilled workforce.
State-of-the-art microscopy, genetic sequencing and proteomics facilities play a vital role in our work to better understand the fundamentals of cancer biology, by teasing out the mechanisms involved in processes such as cell division and DNA repair.
More specialist facilities include the cell culture facility, which supplies the Division of Structural Biology with a means of expressing recombinant proteins in eukaryotic cells, and the Breast Cancer Now Nina Barough pathology core facility, which provides the Breast Cancer Now Toby Robins Research Centre with histopathological data for both research and diagnostic purposes. Confocal and live cell imaging facilities provide cell sorting and imaging services.
Our flow cytometry facility underpins our immune profiling of tumour samples, a crucial part of our immunotherapy research.
And with the latest equipment and unrivalled expertise in the molecular characterisation of tumours, the Tumour Profiling Unit supports researchers at the ICR and our partner institutions across the UK to accelerate progress towards precision therapies.
Support for our discoveries is underpinned by our innovative and unrivalled £2.8m, six-petabyte computing and data storage infrastructure, which combines resilience and security with very rapid access. Our Department of Data Science is building on this digital infrastructure to create an innovative Knowledge Hub for sharing and analysing data. The mechanical workshop can help with the design and manufacture of new lab equipment.
We leverage our influence to attract quality collaborations from industry and academia. For instance, through a partnership with Illumina, we became the first centre of our kind to provide access to the NovaSeq next-generation genome sequencing instrument.
And, by working with Imperial College London and other London partners, ICR scientists now have access to multi-million pound Cryo-EM technology, to study protein complexes in unprecedented detail.