Resistance to chemotherapy and molecularly targeted therapies are major challenges associated with current cancer research. The mechanisms of resistance to 'classical' cytotoxic chemotherapeutics and to therapies that are designed to be selective for specific molecular targets share many features, such as alterations in the drug target, activation of prosurvival pathways and ineffective induction of cell death. With the increasing arsenal of anticancer agents, improving preclinical models and the advent of powerful high-throughput screening techniques, there are now unprecedented opportunities to understand and overcome drug resistance through the clinical assessment of rational therapeutic drug combinations and the use of predictive biomarkers to enable patient stratification.

At SPARC, we are working on next generation small molecules to overcome resistance observed with existing drugs in Haematology, Breast Cancer, Lung Cancer and Prostate Cancer.