Cancer Immunology/Immunotherapy: The research is conducted in the John van Geest Cancer Research Centre at Nottingham Trent University. It focuses on the identification of new tumour associated proteins, pre-clinical and clinical studies on tumour vaccines and the identification of peptide epitopes associating with MHC class I and class II antigens. The team of 15 research staff collaborates with major European Research Institutes. They are engaged in research to develop and apply cancer vaccines. In association with Professor Creaser and scientists working in his laboratory at NTU, a number of MHC associated peptides of tumour antigens have been identified and in some instances this has resulted in clinical vaccine-based trials.
Research in cancer immunology is therefore focussed on developing vaccines to treat patients with cancer. For this research molecular (SEREX cloning) and protein (phenomic fingerprinting by MALDI mass spectrometry-based methodologies are used. In particular, the use of MALDI mass spectrometry analysis and computer based bioinformatics provides a powerful means of identifying protein biomarkers associating with disease stage and response to therapy. Our research is multidisciplinary, involving cellular and serological assays to detect tumour immune responses, biochemistry, analytical mass spectrometry, molecular biology and the development and application of artificial neural networks to identify biomarkers.
