Drug screening robot comes to the rescue for kids with cancer

The Children’s Cancer Institute Australia for Medical Research (CCIA) has received $3.1 million to fund a new drug screening robot designed to radically improve the understanding and treatment of cancer in children.

The Australian Cancer Research Foundation (ACRF) is putting up the money for the new technology which will form part of the new ACRF Drug Discovery Centre. To be housed at the new Lowy Cancer Research Centre at UNSW, the screening robot is said to be capable of completing a typical year’s worth of medical research in just days.

It would allow, for instance, the screening thousands of small molecule drugs to determine which ones have the potential to be developed into safer therapies which target only the aggressive cancer cells afflicting children without damaging normal healthy tissue.

This especially important due to many adverse health risks facing children who are treated for cancer, including impaired hearing which can lead to learning and other difficulties.

“The ACRF Drug Discovery Centre offers a huge advance in fast tracking critical research to find a cure for kids with cancer,” said Professor Murray Norris, Director of the ACRF Drug Discovery Centre.

“It took CCIA five years to manually search through thousands of potential drug candidates to find one of CCIA's most promising drugs in development for childhood cancer,” he added.

“With this drug screening robot we could potentially discover effective drug candidates within days”.

The new tchnology is also expected to help the CCIA extract further value from its children’s tumour bank, which is a repository of children’s tumour samples collected over the last 20 years and snap frozen and stored in nitrogen.