Public Funding for The Babraham Institute

The pharmaceutical industry makes medicines designed to reverse the things that go wrong in cells and cause disease. The list of the targets that go wrong is far from complete, and we do not have the screening tools to find and then develop drugs to these targets. To cope with an increasing healthcare need, we therefore need to expand that list and to make new tools so that we can produce new medicines, more rapidly. At present, our existing screening tools can find new targets to put on the list, but they cannot tell us how to go about repairing them. PhoreMost has tried to solve this problem by directly finding new things to add to the list, at the same time as writing the instruction manual for how to mend them. Our current screening system works, but we want to make it even better, so we have deisgned a new and improved system. This new system is based on turning inhibitory or negative effects on cells into positive effects which are easier for us to identify, because only the disease cells which contain an interesting target can grow. This will make our screening process much quicker, cheaper and more efficient than it was before, allowing us tackle more diseases more quickly. In the first instance, we will use our new screening system to find new targets for cancer.