CellCentric, a biotechnology company specialising in epigenetics, said it is sponsoring a collaboration in cancer research with Professor Chris Boshoff of the Wolfson Institute of Biomedical Research, University College London.
In a statement, the company said the research will study epigenetic-related cancer cell targets, in a search for new treatments. Epigenetics is a growing new field of research studying the way genes get suppressed or expressed inside the cell; some cancers, for instance, are thought to arise when genes that would normally hinder a cancer get suppressed.
Boshoff is Professor of Cancer Medicine at the Wolfson Institute, co-Director of Cancer Research UK’s Viral Oncology Group, and Chairman of the Wellcome Trust’s Functional Genomics Initiative on Stem Cells.
CellCentric was founded in May 2004, based partly on epigenetics research at the University of Cambridge. Besides the UCL collaboration, it has an intellectual property agreement in epigenetics with the Babraham Institute, in Cambridge.