Impact history and overview
From a portakabin to gold standard cancer research.
Cancer Research UK Edinburgh Centre (also known as Edinburgh Cancer Research Centre - ECRC) was created as a result of good will and collaboration between the University of Edinburgh, the Lothian Health Board (currently NHS Lothian) and the Imperial Cancer Research Fund (currently Cancer Research UK) in 1979 (initially as the Imperial Cancer Research Fund Medical Oncology Unit in Edinburgh). From its very beginning as a portable cabin on the Western General Hospital campus it has had significant clinical, academic, economic and social impact on Edinburgh, Scotland, United Kingdom and internationally. This impact has been steadily increasing over the years (accompanying the Centre’s growth and expansion) and there is no exaggeration in the statement that nowadays many of the Cancer Research UK Edinburgh Centre's activities, including numerous basic-research discoveries and clinical breakthroughs contributed by the Centre’s scientists and clinicians, make a distinct “foot-print” on the global scale and find their place as media-headlines world-wide. For many years the Centre has also been a hub for local outreach and public engagement activities encouraging people to study STEM subjects and rising awareness about human health and disease.
The initial mission of the Centre in the 1980s was the development of more successful drug therapies for all forms of cancer and looking for new ways of reducing the side-effects of anti-cancer drugs. One of the early success stories was the Centre’s involvement in research on treatment of emesis, a common side-effect of cancer chemotherapy. For example, the Centre was responsible for the very first clinical trial of a 5-HT3 receptor antagonist, heralding in the dramatic changes in emesis control that subsequently followed the development of that class of compounds. Nowadays, 5-HT3 receptor antagonists are considered the gold standard for controlling the nausea and vomiting produced by cancer chemotherapy and are used world-wide reducing suffering of millions of patients.
After over 35 years of intensive basic, translational and clinical research (and multiple valuable contributions to “the war on cancer”) the Cancer Research UK Edinburgh Centre’s goals still revolve around discovering more effective cancer therapies and reducing side-effects of anti-cancer drugs, however these goals are now being approached in a much more comprehensive and technologically advanced way by an amazing mix of scientists, clinicians, statisticians, bioinformaticians and engineers with excellent support from technical, administrative and commercialisation staff. It is impossible to mention all forms of impact and contributions originating from the Centre but broadly speaking Cancer Research UK Edinburgh Centre's impact can be divided into four main categories: (1) Academic Impact (e.g. training next generations of scientists and clinicians, technology development and scientific publications on novel findings); (2) Clinical Impact (e.g. development of new and critical evaluation of existing therapeutics, providing improved clinical guidelines); (3) Economic Impact (e.g. collaborations with UK and international companies, commercialisation of patents and new products/technologies); (4) Other forms of impact (e.g. social impact, affecting UK and Scottish Government’s policies). For more information on a particular type of impact please visit respective sections on this website. The “Impact case studies” section contains some recent examples of Cancer Research UK Edinburgh Centre's impact (and pathways taken to achieve it) provided in a convenient downloadable form.