Cancer Research UK invests

Cancer Research UK is to provide £16m of funding over five years for two new drug discovery programmes at the Paterson Institute for Cancer Research in Manchester and the Beatson Institute for Cancer Research in Glasgow.

The charity has also awarded grants of up to £2.5m each to the University of Southampton and the University of Oxford to kick-start new therapeutic antibody work.

The Manchester and Glasgow researchers aim to seek out potential drug targets and develop cancer drug treatments of the future, while the grants awarded to Southampton and Oxford will be used to create new vaccines that stimulate the body's immune system to fight cancer.

The investments are intended to broaden the charity's expertise in small molecule drug discovery programmes.

"The two new programmes will strengthen the charity's capability in this crucial area of research and will be able to harness the charity's basic-science expertise to discover potential new treatments that will help fight cancer," said Dr Peter Sneddon, Cancer Research UK's executive director of clinical and translational research funding.

"This investment is in line with Cancer Research UK's ambitious five-year plan which will see the charity spend around £300 million a year on core areas of science to reduce cancer deaths - including greater investment in those areas where survival rates remain poor. Finding new drugs which work where others have failed will be core to us delivering this."