Dr Sankari Nagarajan is investigating how some triple negative breast cancers spread to other parts of the body. And she wants to see if drugs against proteins called nuclear receptors could stop this from happening.

Professor Penelope Ottewell and her PhD student are testing new combinations of drugs to treat breast cancer that’s spread to the bone. They’re hoping that this work could be the foundation of new treatment options for secondary breast cancer.

Professor Elinor Sawyer is looking for new ways to tell which lobular breast cancer patients may benefit from personalised therapies. She believes the environment within and around the tumour may hold a clue.

Professor Leonie Young is working to determine whether some secondary breast cancers that have spread to the brain could be treated with drugs called PARP inhibitors. She hopes that more people could benefit from this type of treatment.

Professor Janet Brown wants to determine if combining an immunotherapy drug avelumab with another drug, radium-233, could make the treatment more effective. She hopes this combination will improve the immune response to secondary breast cancer in the bone and at other sites in the body.

Professor Simak Ali and Dr Lesley-Ann Martin are investigating how proteins called CDKs play a part in cancer’s resistance to palbociclib – a drug used to treat oestrogen receptor positive (ER+) secondary breast cancer. He is exploring whether blocking a protein called CDK7 could be a new way to treat tumours that have become resistant to palbociclib.