Multi-million pound cancer research centre opened at Nottingham Trent University.
By emma matthews
A MULTI-MILLION pound cancer research centre at Nottingham Trent University was to be opened officially today.
Sir Michael Parkinson, Chancellor of the university, was due to welcome guests at the Clifton campus, to open the John Van Geest Cancer Research Centre.
Equipment will allow scientists to get inside individual cancer cells to analyse them and the centre will also be working to develop vaccines against breast and prostate cancers, and ways to predict patient responses to treatment.
Centre director Professor Robert Rees said: "Research funding is hard to get, especially at the moment, and we're really lucky that we've got this amount of money underpinning our research.
"We have also had the opportunity to build the centre to our own designs, in order to make it as efficient as we could.
"I don't think many scientists get the opportunity to design exactly what they need for their work."
Professor Rees added: "There are people who are still not responding to current treatments. It is important to find new therapies.
"Equally, it's impossible to know how a patient will respond to treatment – so we need ways of predicting whether a patient will or will not benefit from different courses of action.
"If we could eliminate that uncertainty, treatments would be much more effective and it would make a big difference to saving lives."
The centre was largely funded by a £7.65 million donation from the John and Lucille van Geest Foundation, and was to be officially opened by their daughter, Hilary (Gussy) Marlowe. Guests were then to be given a tour of the labs to meet staff.
It's not the first time the city has been home to ground-breaking cancer research. In 1955 Professor Robert Baldwin, from the University of Nottingham, published the first scientific papers exploring the idea of immunity to cancer – and Professor Rees later became a member of his research team.
He said: "Professor Baldwin helped Nottingham to build a reputation as a centre for cancer research.
"I came back to the city 15 years ago, and we're still carrying on that work."
