Ground-breaking treatments for cancer
While AstraZeneca’s move to Cambridge a decade ago kicked off a new chapter of partnership, our history runs much deeper. One collaboration, which brings together Cambridge’s pioneering science with AstraZeneca’s drug development expertise, began more than 30 years ago and continues to benefit patients today.
The story of this collaboration began in the 1990s when Professor Steve Jackson, a researcher at the University of Cambridge, connected a chance observation with a leap of thinking.
He realised that it was possible to switch off certain DNA repair mechanisms in cancer cells, causing them to die, while normal cells “just shrugged their shoulders and carried on growing and dividing.”
In 1997 Jackson founded a company, KuDOS, to explore the possibility of turning this discovery into a treatment for cancer. Mark O’Connor, now Chief Scientist in Oncology R&D at AstraZeneca, was at that time a researcher at the Institute of Molecular Cell Biology in Singapore.
Their paths crossed a few times and Jackson mentioned he was setting up a company and asked O’Connor to join him. O’Connor agreed, becoming team leader, and they started to see their work on PARP inhibitors produce promising results in BRCA1/2-mutated cancers.
They also realised that the next stages of clinical trials were going to be too expensive for a start-up company to resource. The best way forward would be to join forces with a global biopharmaceutical company and in 2006, the company was acquired by AstraZeneca.
O’Connor became part of the AstraZeneca development team and headed the development of the lead PARP inhibitor, “leading the science all the way through to its first approval to treat patients with certain types of ovarian cancer.”
O’Connor was also appointed to lead one of AstraZeneca’s strategic biology areas, focussed on targeting the DNA Damage Response (DDR) – the field of study that underpins PARP inhibitors. DDR has become a major pillar of AstraZeneca’s cancer drug discovery programme.
“We have treated over a hundred thousand patients worldwide since that first approval and now have a portfolio of five DDR-targeted therapies in various stages of clinical development.”
Mark O’Connor, Chief Scientist in Oncology R&D at AstraZeneca
Combining breakthrough science originating at the University of Cambridge with AstraZeneca’s drug development capabilities has been a resounding – and very Cambridge – success story that has helped to advance care for patients.
Image
Professor Sir Steve Jackson: credit: University of Cambridge
Veeva ID: GB-68348
Date of preparation: July 2025