Discussion

The Edinburgh Cancer Discovery Unit (ECDU) was founded in 2011 as a not-for-profit activity to provide a multidisciplinary group of core skills embracing advanced technology platforms and disease models, which drive innovations in oncology drug discovery and development. The overarching aims of the ECDU are to enhance clinical predictivity of preclinical oncology drug discovery strategies and improve patient stratification and clinical efficacy. To achieve these goals we work in close collaboration with local clinicians, multidisciplinary academic research groups (biology, chemistry, informatics & biophysics) and industry partners.

Edinburgh Phenotypic Assay Development Centre (E-PAD) represents a new initiative to expand ECDU activities across disease area. The E-Pad mission is to develop new disease-relevant cell based assays and state-of-the-art technology platforms, which advance medium- to high-throughput phenotypic screening. E-PAD links clinical and basic research groups with the latest innovations in automated imaging, image-informatics, biological modelling and assay screening standards to build; novel, robust and disease-relevant cell culture screening platforms to support collaborative alliances which advance phenotypic drug discovery, stem cell therapy, target identification and target validation studies.

We describe our current technology platforms, exemplar projects and the development of national and international academic networks which support public-private partnerships.