About the centre

Scientific translation to the clinic has been hampered by two factors:

• a lack of a community of academic, science-minded specialist clinicians who work in neuro-oncology
• poor understanding of the key biological vulnerabilities to target therapeutically.

For both paediatric and adult brain cancers, there are no effective translational pipelines from basic research to clinical trials to enable evidence-led ‘smart’ clinical advances in a UK-wide network with global connections.

At the Brain Tumour Centre of Excellence, we are tackling these issues, with integration into our strong cancer research and training infrastructure at both the University of Edinburgh and UCL.

We'll establish a new translational pipeline that is built on a deeper biological understanding of brain cancer. This will translate biological and data-intensive health research and phenotypic-led drug discovery (in disease-relevant and predictive pre-clinical models) via a clinical community that is ready to perform state-of-the-art adaptive clinical studies.

To fuel the pipeline, we try to maximise new cross-disciplinary opportunities in data-driven innovation, imaging technologies and growing strengths in phenotypic drug discovery using patient-derived glioma cellular models.

In 5-10 years, we aim to have transformed the landscape across the UK for discovery and clinical evaluation of new brain cancer therapeutics.

UCL Centre Leads

UCL Centre Associates