Steve admits he can be a bit evangelical about DNA repair.
For the past 35 years in Cambridge, he and his team have explored how our cells are able to deal with damage to our DNA.
Thanks to his and others' work we now know that an orchestrated network of ‘molecular police’ patrol, recognise and repair mistakes in our DNA caused either by accident or by agents like UV light or carcinogens. DNA repair keeps our genetic material intact so that it can carry on encoding the functions necessary for life.
But Steve's fundamental curiosity about the nitty-gritty of DNA repair also led him in what he describes as “wonderfully unforeseen directions”.
After a chance observation and 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”.
This led to him setting up a team of scientists in 1999 that created olaparib, a new class of cancer drug, which has now been used to treat over 140,000 patients globally. One of these patients is Jackie van Bochoven.
