Dr Amanda Swain leads the ICR’s Tumour Profiling Unit, which is a state-of-the-art centre designed to accelerate progress towards precision medicine.

Unfortunately, the vast majority of experimental cancer drugs entering phase I clinical trials will not make it all the way through to the market. One way to improve on these poor success rates is to develop better models for evaluating the effectiveness of potential new treatments before they move into clinical trials.

Dr Swain’s team is developing xenografts derived from tumour biopsies collected from patients who are undergoing clinical trials. Using these more relevant models for preclinical testing will help ensure that only the most promising experimental drugs move into human studies – enabling time and resources to be focussed on the treatments that are most likely to succeed.

Dr Swain is open to partnering with pharmaceutical companies who are looking to carry out pre-clinical testing of novel drugs in patient-derived xenograft models. This innovative approach also opens exciting opportunities to screen for new treatment combinations that can help overcome drug resistance.