The overall aim of the Helleday laboratory is to improve the treatment of cancer by exploiting cancer defects in order to taylor specific drugs for all types of cancer, with minimal side-effects. We work under the ethic “from bench to bedside” covering both basic research and translational work and are fortunate to have a number of collaborations across a range of disciplines. Our basic research involves building an understanding of the mechanisms of action of current DNA damaging agents, in particular at replication forks. We are also interested in replication lesions and the characterisation of pathways repairing these. On the translational side, we are working on identifying synthetic lethal interactions in the DNA repair network in order to find drug targets for cancer therapy. Once identified, we wish to identify small molecule inhibitors against them that we can then go on and test in in vivo tumour models and ultimately use to treat patients in the clinic.

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