Udai Banerji
Team Leader
Clinical Pharmacology & Trials (including Drug Metabolism an
The Institute Of Cancer Research
United Kingdom
Biography
Dr Udai Banerji is a Cancer Research UK Reader in Molecular Cancer Pharmacology at The Institute of Cancer Research, London, and an Honorary Consultant at The Royal Marsden. He leads the Clinical Pharmacology and Trials team at the Cancer Research UK Cancer Therapeutics Unit at the ICR and is the Deputy Director of the Drug Development Unit. Dr Banerji is involved in multidisciplinary aspects of early drug discovery, working with preclinical biology and pharmacology teams to get drugs into the clinic. He designs clinical trials of first-in-human studies and ensures that they are carried out to the highest possible standards. As a practising clinician, he forms a crucial link between the ICR’s Division of Cancer Therapeutics, which discovers new anti-cancer drugs, and the Division of Clinical Studies, which includes the Drug Development Unit at the ICR and The Royal Marsden. He also leads the Clinical Pharmacodynamic Biomarker Group, which is responsible for evaluating pharmacodynamics biomarkers in patient tissue, transitioning biomarkers used in drug discovery onto platforms that can be used to evaluate human tissue from patients. He also runs a group investigating drug resistance and designs and runs hypothesis-testing clinical trials to explore preclinical data generated from these laboratories. Dr Banerji is a module leader of the Experimental Cancer Pharmacology/Advanced Pharmacology module of the ICR’s MSc for Oncology course trainees from London and the South-East. He also supervises two clinical fellows in his laboratories who are working towards MD (Res) and PhD degrees, respectively. Dr Banerji enjoys working at the ICR and its partner, The Royal Marsden, which e
Research Interest
The Clinical Pharmacology and Trials Team is responsible for the study of the preclinical and clinical pharmacology, and for the early clinical trials, of new anti-cancer agents developed in the Cancer Research UK Cancer Therapeutics Unit. Such investigations may include the study of mechanisms of action and resistance, toxicology, pharmacokinetics, early dose-finding studies and the development of pharmacodynamic biomarkers for the measurement of drug action in tumour and surrogate tissues. These may be molecular assays or functional imaging studies. The emphasis is increasingly on hypothesis-testing clinical trials of agents acting on new molecular targets including cell signalling, cell survival, the cell cycle control machinery, chromatin modulation and angiogenesis. The Drug Metabolism and Pharmacokinetics (DMPK) Group (led by Dr Florence Raynaud), within the Clinical Pharmacology and Trials Team, is a multidisciplinary group studying the pharmacokinetics of anti-cancer drugs in clinical trials. The group helps to characterise and prioritise the best drugs to enter the clinic: once in clinical trials, the group conducts and analyses pharmacokinetic data crucial to make go/no-go decisions, as well as decisions on optimal doses and schedules of novel anti-cancer drugs.
Publications
-
Hyman, D.M., Smyth, L.M., Donoghue, M.T., Westin, S.N., Bedard, P.L., Dean, E.J., Bando, H., El-Khoueiry, A.B., Pérez-Fidalgo, J.A., Mita, A., et al. (2017). AKT Inhibition in Solid Tumors With AKT1 Mutations. Journal of clinical oncology, Vol.35(20), pp. 2251-2259.
-
Tucker, E.R., Tall, J.R., Danielson, L.S., Gowan, S., Jamin, Y., Robinson, S.P., Banerji, U. & Chesler, L. (2017). Immunoassays for the quantification of ALK and phosphorylated ALK support the evaluation of on-target ALK inhibitors in neuroblastoma. Molecular oncology, Vol.11(8), pp. 996-1006.
-
Zangarini, M., Berry, P., Sludden, J., Raynaud, F.I., Banerji, U., Jones, P., Edwards, D. & Veal, G.J. (2017). Development and validation of a LC–MS/MS method for the quantification of the checkpoint kinase 1 inhibitor SRA737 in human plasma. Bioanalysis, Vol.9(13), pp. 1001-1010.
-
Vormoor, B., Veal, G.J., Griffin, M.J., Boddy, A.V., Irving, J., Minto, L., Case, M., Banerji, U., Swales, K.E., Tall, J.R., et al. (2017). A phase I/II trial of AT9283, a selective inhibitor of aurora kinase in children with relapsed or refractory acute leukemia: challenges to run early phase clinical trials for children with leukemia. Pediatric blood & cancer, Vol.64(6), pp. e26351-e26351.
-
George, A., Kristeleit, R., Rafii, S., Michie, C.O., Bowen, R., Michalarea, V., van Hagen, T., Wong, M., Rallis, G., Molife, L.R., et al. (2017). Clinical factors of response in patients with advanced ovarian cancer participating in early phase clinical trials. European journal of cancer, Vol.76, pp. 52-59.
-
Brown, J.S. & Banerji, U. (2017). Maximising the potential of AKT inhibitors as anti-cancer treatments. Pharmacology & therapeutics, Vol.172, pp. 101-115.
