Cancer Drug Discovery Laboratory

The Cancer Drug Discovery Group comprises three laboratories based in the Hawthorn building at De Montfort University School of Pharmacy in Leicester, England. Drug synthesis and drug formulation work is carried out in the Medicinal Chemistry laboratory, biological testing is carried out in the tissue culture labs, and drug metabolism is carried out in the adjoining analytical laboratory pictured above. The group is fully equiped for all stages of drug development from discovery to formulation. Pictured above is the LC-MS instrument in the analytical laboratory used for discovering the metabolic pathways of salvestrols, showing an HPLC machine interfaced to a quadrupole mass spectrometer fitted with a spin trap detector. The salvestrol bioactivation work is done by incubating the salvestrols with CYP enzymes and identifying the anticancer meatbolites formed using the LC-MS technology. This laboratory is where the initial discovery of resveratrol acting as a salvestrol was made, and this then led to the discovery of much more potent salvestrols such as salvestrol Q40.