Exploring drug targets to treat and prevent cancer

It’s possible that some medications used for lowering blood sugar, preventing inflammation or supporting weight loss might also be used to reduce someone’s risk of developing cancer or their risk of an existing cancer progressing.

Project aims

The goal of this project is to identify new or repurpose existing medications that could be used to reduce a person’s risk of cancer development and progression.

We will do this by first identifying proteins in the body that are linked to cancer. Identifying these proteins means they can then be targeted by drugs (new or already existing) which we believe may be successful at preventing cancer development or progression.

We will use Mendelian randomisation (MR) to identify biomarkers associated with the risk of cancer development and progression. Biomarkers are molecules that can be measured and are a good indicator of the normal and abnormal processes taking place in someone’s body. Mendelian randomisation lets researchers study how our behaviours, environments and other factors lead to different health outcomes by looking at the genetic differences between us.

What we hope to achieve

We hope our analyses provide evidence for:

• medications that could be re-purposed to treat or prevent cancer
• targets for the development of new medications