International Training Programmes

The Brazilian Federal Agency for Support and Evaluation of Graduate Education (CAPES) and the UoN Cell Signalling (School of Life Sciences) and Medicinal Chemistry (School of Pharmacy) Research Groups have recently formalised the innovative Program CAPES-UoN in Drug Discovery. This consortium, which has got a committed budget of £12M for the next 4 years, awarded 7 joint projects involving UoN Academics and high profile Brazilian HEIs and Research Centres, such as the University of Sao Paulo (USP) and the National Centre for Research in Energy and Materials (CNPEM). During the next 48 months, young investigators funded by the Brazilian Government will join the Cell Signalling and Medicinal Chemistry labs at UoN for a year, starting June 2015. They will pursue joint research goals, while having access to state-of-the-art experimental approaches in the field of Drug Discovery still unavailable in Brazil, replicating the knowledge when they return to their home institutions

This exciting post graduate training programme has recruited six students, three in Nottingham and three in Melbourne to undertake a four year project and will run for two cycles. The Nottingham students will spend three years in Nottingham and then one year in Melbourne (Monash) and vice versa. The Nottingham projects are focused on studying GPCRs using imaging techniques and methodologies within the Cell Signalling Group.

The 5-year K4DD program started in November 2012. K4DD is supported by the Innovative Medicines Initiative Joint Undertaking (IMI JU), resources of which are composed of a financial contribution from the European Union's Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013) and EFPIA companies' in kind contribution.

 The overall program consists of four Work Packages in which a total of 25 PhD students and postdocs are performing the research with support from senior researchers of all partners: 9 academic institutes, 7 large pharmaceutical companies and 4 Small-and Medium-sized Enterprises (SMEs).

 Cell Signalling group is a major group contributing to the 21MEuro K4DD pan-European drug discovery programme.  A number of GPCRs are being studied by the group utilising a range of methodologies with imaging being a key tool.

ONCORNET will bring together the leading research scientists and labs in Europe with an interest in GPCRs and 15 early stage researchers. We will employ all the latest multidisciplinary research technologies to understand the role of these GPCRs in cancer and develop CXCR4 and CXCR7 tools for diagnostic and therapeutic purposes. Importantly, developed approaches can be extrapolated to other oncogenic GPCRs. The ONCORNET consortium will offer an extensive multidisciplinary training programme to the ESRs to ensure that they can operate in today’s drug discovery programmes. This will include both research (e.g. drug discovery, proteomics, imaging, modelling) and transferable (e.g. entrepreneurship, writing, media training) skill sets –that is rarely offered at PhD level. We will train ESRs to develop the next generation of multidisciplinary scientists with skills that are highly demanded by many of today’s employers in drug development industries. Cell Signalling Group is part of the 3.5M Euro Marie Curie Oncornet Training Fellowship Programme and has recruited a number of students.