AstraZeneca and SCRI ally on cancer research

AstraZeneca has announced a new oncology-focused collaboration with the Sarah Cannon Research Institute (SCRI) in the field of personalised medicine.

The agreement will see the organisations studying molecular profiling to classify tissue based upon genetic profiles, for the purpose of treating cancers and predicting response to therapy in individual patients.

Researchers will be aiming to identify potential participants for clinical trials and explore biomarkers that predict response to specific treatments, thus supporting the creation of more effective new cancer drugs by AstraZeneca.

The pharmaceutical company is one of the initial participants in SCRI's molecular profiling programme and has been working alongside the institute since 2010.

Professor Andrew Hughes, vice-president of early clinical development for AstraZeneca, said: "Through this cutting-edge programme design, we can rapidly and effectively implement clinical trials with greater access to a network of cancer patients for enrolment."

This comes after the firm announced new drug discovery alliances with Cancer Research UK and the University of Manchester last month.