Sygnature Discovery partners on pancreatic cancer research

Sygnature Discovery, which claims to be the UK’s largest independent drug discovery expert and research partner, has been appointed by UCL to lead an optimization project targeting pancreatic cancer.

The project is based on research done by Professor Stephen Neidle’s group in the UCL School of Pharmacy, in collaboration with the UCL Drug Discovery Group, led by Dr Richard Angell. It is funded by a £1 million ($1.3 million) investment from the £50 million UCL Technology Fund, managed by Albion Capital in collaboration with UCL Business.

Professor Neidle is a pioneer in the design of drugs which effectively ‘switch off’ the functioning of cancer-related genes. His group has developed a new drug which is designed to target quadruplex structures in DNA. Such quadruplex structures are more prevalent in certain cancers than in normal cells, providing opportunity for targeted killing of these cancer cells. One type of cancer cell shown to be affected by this type of molecular approach is pancreatic cancer.