We are delighted to announce that, with the renewal of the CRUK Cambridge Centre this year, the Milner will become an Affiliated Institute, reflecting our central role in supporting researchers across Cambridge.
Over the past five years, the Onco-Innovation programme for the CRUK Cambridge Centre has been co-led by our Director Tony Kouzarides and Susan Galbraith (AstraZeneca) and managed by Rebecca Harris, our Head of Target Discovery. The Onco-Innovation programme has established innovative collaborations between CRUK Cambridge Centre researchers and pharma partners in the Milner Therapeutics Consortium, and initiated inter-disciplinary pilot projects. Our events have also launched oncology focused funding challenges and highlighted innovative clinically-relevant research within the local scientific community.
A key goal of the Onco-Innovation programme was to establish a physical institute, which was achieved in 2019 when the Milner moved into the Jeffrey Cheah Biomedical Centre on the biomedical campus. This created a physical hub for cross-sector research and partnerships including the CRUK-AZ Functional Genomics Centre and has enabled us to work with researchers across the CRUK Centre to establish our own research pipeline. We have also established entrepreneurship support through our partnership with Start Codon health accelerator and the creation of the Frame Shift bio-incubator.
Our affiliated status now offers additional opportunities for researchers and clinicians throughout the CRUK Cambridge Centre to engage with the Milner through collaboration with our in-house Computational Research team led by Namshik Han and the Target Discovery team led by Rebecca Harris. Our focus is on early stages of target identification, de-risking targets ahead of drug discovery programme initiation, and lowering the barriers associated with adoption of complex disease-relevant models into drug discovery workflows. “It’s fantastic to see what the Onco-Innovation programme has achieved and we encourage researchers across the cancer centre to engage with the Milner Institute to see how they can benefit from our unique capabilities and environment” said Tony Kouzarides.
Read more about cancer research based in the Milner Institute:
CRUK-AZ Functional Genomics Centre
CRUK Children’s Brain Tumour Centre of Excellence group leader Manav Pathania
Group Leader Kostas Tzelepis
Drone footage of the Jeffrey Cheah Biomedical Centre, courtesy of Cambridge Biomedical Campus Ltd.