Lobular breast cancer can be more difficult to treat than some other types of breast cancer. Dr Patrick Derksen is looking at whether combinations of palbociclib and gedatolisib could stop this type of breast cancer progressing, giving women the best possible chance of survival.

PARP inhibitors are a new class of drugs that work well for patients who have changes in their BRCA genes. Professor Claudio Sette and his team want to understand more about how these drugs work and whether they could benefit more patients with triple negative breast cancer.

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.

Professor Jukka Westermarck is finding new ways to predict which existing drugs will be most effective for triple negative breast cancers. He is investigating how different combinations of altered proteins in cancer cells affect their response to a number of experimental drugs.

Professor Catrin Pritchard and her team has developed a new, more personalised type of tumour model to test drugs before they enter clinical trials. She is exploring whether this system can more accurately represent how drugs will work when given to patients.

Professor Nicholas Turner is testing if combining a drug palbociclib together with the immunotherapy drug avelumab is safe and could be used to successfully treat a sub-type of triple negative breast cancer.