University of Birmingham researcher seeks to reduce the damage done by chemotherapy, making cancer treatment more tolerable for children.
Dr Marie-Christine Jones, at the University of Birmingham, has received £49k funding from the Little Princess Trust to investigate nanomedicines that could make treatment safer for children with cancer.
This type of treatment uses particles 1000-times smaller than a strand of human hair to deliver the anticancer medicines, which can be safer as they are expected to slip through the gaps in leaky tumour blood vessels.
Dr Jones’s project is one of three to be funding in the New Ideas grant scheme awarded in partnership with Children’s Cancer and Leukaemia Group.
The research aims to understand how nanomedicines can work for children, learn more about tumour blood vessels, and test nanomedicines in leaky blood vessel models to inform the design of new drug delivery systems.
“I will be testing blood samples from children with cancer to see if we can predict how nanomedicines will behave and confirm that they can be targeted specifically to the tumour, to potentially reduce the side effects of cancer treatments.
“This work will help reframe how we view nanomedicines and uncover their impact on improving the tolerability of cancer treatments for children.
I feel really excited as this work could have a big impact on how anticancer drugs are administered to children, as well as improving our understanding of how cancer develops and can be targeted in children.
The Little Princess Trust uses Children’s Cancer and Leukaemia Group's significant expertise to run and manage its extensive research programme to ensure that only the best research is funded.
Senior Lecturer in Pharmaceutics
Staff profile for Dr Marie-Christine Jones, Senior Lecturer in Pharmaceutics in the Institute of Clinical Sciences at the University of Birmingham.
