Who we are?
The Centre for Circulating Tumour Cell Diagnostics & Research has been established at the Ingham Institute for Applied Medical Research in mid 2013. Since then the CCDR obtained high end equipment for the isolation of circulating tumour cells (CTCs). These cells, released by virtually all solid cancers into the blood stream, can be interrogated for important, tumour specific, biomarkers that can help to guide therapy, monitor response to therapy and predict failure to therapy while providing new biomarker information of the cancer to predict better patient management. The CCDR also analyses other cancer specific entities (such as circulating tumour DNA, circulating tumour RNA and circulating tumour proteins) in a similar manner to CTCs.
Currently we are strictly engaged in medial research, not routine diagnostics. Nevertheless, some of our research is accompanying clinical trials or has established assays that help to select patients for tailored clinical trials, thus our research is already leading to patient benefit.
What have we been up to?
Dr Ma with new NGS instruments.
New next Generation Sequencing instrumenTs
The Ingham Institute recently upgraded their next generation sequencing capacity to a Ion GeneStudio S5 to allow next generation sequencing of liquid biopsy samples inhouse.
NEW CTC isolation instrument
Dr Powter with another new instrument.
The CCDR processes liquid biopsy samples from patients enrolled in clinical trials. Analysis of CTCs aims to understand drug responses better and develop companion diagnostics for successful drugs to identify which patients will benefit from receiving it.
Business as usual
Currently the CCDR and our collaborators have research projects in the following cancers:
Breast Cancer
Prostate Cancer
Ovarian Cancer
Melanoma
Brain Cancer
Lung Cancer
Colorectal Cancer
Gastric Cancer
Pancreatic Cancer