My Story
I'm running a Half Marathon to raise money for Cancer Research UK! Many people will know a person, family member or friend affected by a cancer diagnosis. I've seen what a cancer patient goes through after my Auntie, and Grandmother sadly lost their battles to breast and mesothelioma cancer. From working in the drug discovery field for 4 years now, helping with research for new treatments for cancer, I have also learnt how challenging it can be to reach that endpoint of getting a new drug into the clinic. This is what led me to raise money to support research for CRUK. In work, we explore different molecular targets and also consider combinations with current chemotherapeutic drugs in the clinic, to study what factors contribute to cancers, and how we can formulate new drugs that can essentially stop cancer growth or lead to kill cancer cells. We start from preclinical stages, working with different cancer cell types (such as breast, lung, leukaemia, colorectal etc), and focus on getting a candidate drug that can first demonstrate effects in tumour models, before we can finally test it in clinical trials for patients with the targeted cancer type. This takes time (years!), dedication and money to ensure that we can use the most advanced methods, to measure and test these effects & to therefore help develop new drugs to fight the cancer. I've completed 1 other half marathon so this for sure will be a challenge for me :-) I plan to train for the few months before it and will be trying to raise as much as I can for CRUK. Donate to my page today and help bring forward the day when all cancers are cured.
