LCMS: From Pharmacokinetics to Metabolomics

My team is involved in drug metabolism and pharmacokinetics of novel chemical entities and in the clinical pharmacokinetic evaluation of some of our agents, which have reached Phase I/II clinical trials at The Royal Marsden Hospital...

Bernie Monaghan (BM): Could you tell us a little about the unit and group in which you work at Sutton?

Florence Raynaud (FR): I work at The Institute of Cancer Research (ICR) in the Section of Cancer Therapeutics. Our mission is to discover and develop new drugs to treat cancer. We have an impressive track record in drug discovery in oncology as four compounds (melphalan, chlorambucil, carboplatin and ralitrexed) originating from the ICR have gained regulatory approval. In addition, we have several compounds in late clinical development (abiraterone, satraplatin and picoplatin). Six of our compounds are in early phase I/II clinical evaluations.

They include conventional antiproliferative agents that are selectively transported to tumours and molecularly targeted agents such as HSP90, HDAC and PI3K inhibitors. These compounds have been licensed to pharmaceutical companies such as Novartis, Roche, Genentech and Onyx pharmaceuticals and some of them have been developed in partnership with biotechnology companies. We have an exciting pipeline which includes PKB inhibitors already licensed to Astra Zeneca, while B-RAF inhibitors, CHK1 and Aurora kinase inhibitors are all at licensing stage.