Chordoma UK

Over the last few years, Professor Flanagan’s research team and colleagues have taken tumours from patients treated at RNOH (with their consent and ethical approval), and 5 chordoma cell lines have been established from these tumours. 3 other cell lines have been generously donated from other researchers. This means that for the first time, a reasonable number of cell lines are available to screen against a large number of drugs / compounds (1000-2000), some of which are already used in the treatment of other tumours, and some of which are in development. By studying the effect of 100s of drugs on the chordoma cell lines we should be able to identify what induces the expression of brachyury. If can identify this/these, we have other potential targets to which drugs can be developed. We will also investigate if we can ‘silence’ brachyury in the chordoma cells using a virus. Research using these cell lines is has recently commenced and it is hoped that the outcome of this work will have an impact on the way all chordoma patients are treated worldwide.