I am working to develop better drugs to treat skin, breast and blood cancers. Chemotherapy is a lifesaver and is able to attack all sorts of tumours, but it also damages healthy organs, which often results in harsh side effects that reduce a patient’s quality of life. To treat cancer more effectively we need to develop medicines that are tailored for a specific cancer and are not toxic to healthy organs. Each type of cancer is unique and results from a specific malfunction inside a cell that starts growing in an uncontrolled way to form a tumour. I am developing peptide-based therapeutics to target and deliver medicines inside the cells responsible for a specific cancer. From the inside, we can deactivate abnormal cells and stop the cancer from growing and spreading, without affecting healthy organs.
