"The £2,000 is helping us to use a Flow Cytometer in cancer cell work."

Thank you to every Warwick staff member who joined in with our Christmas Dress Down Day 2016.

We're delighted to report that your funds are now hard at work in the chemistry labs here on campus.

As you might know,  our chemists are involved in developing new drugs to attack cancers.

They have devised a drug that is 49x more powerful than Cisplatin for treating cancer, and are now involved in the pre-clinical development of this compound, before taking it to clinical trial.

That's where your funds come in.

Last year, the team were gifted a Flow Cytometer to help with cancer cell work. This equipment will help them test new drugs on cancer cells, helping them to develop targeted drugs with new 'smart' delivery systems to target only the cancer cells. However, until the Centre received the money from the Dress Down Day, they were unable to set up and use the Flow Cytometer, it just wasn't possible in the budget and they were facing delays.

Thanks to you, they can get going right away. Professor Peter Sadler (pictured above with Dr Isolda Romero Canelon, and new lab assistant Bindy Heer, whose role was also funded by donations), says:

We want to say thank you to everyone who gave a donation in December, you're making a direct difference to our work by helping us get going with an incredibly powerful piece of equipment.

We're going to use the Flow Cytometer to see how different types of cell respond to drugs - both existing ones and new ones - from all kinds of cancer, in particular, ovarian, prostate, bladder, colon, lung and breast.

We'll also use it to determine the mechanisms by which drugs kill cancer cells, and assess the effects of cell cycles (or clocks) on drug activity. There's growing evidence that drug effectiveness and side-effects depend upon our circadian rhythms, and we're working closely with Professor Francis Levi in Warwick Medical School to study this."

We depend on extra funds raised like this. Sometimes it's used for equipment, and sometimes as 'seed-funding' to explore and prove areas of research which we can then take to larger medical councils and funders for greater financial support.

We are so appreciative of the support of the University community, which truly has unlocked our research. Thank you again."

• You might also like this latest news from the team:  Cancer cells seen to be targeted and killed from the inside with metal-based compound