Richard Edmondson qualified in medicine from Newcastle University in 1992 and after a year of surgical training in New Zealand undertook speciality training in the Northern Deanery in Obstetrics and Gynaecology with subspecialty training in Gynaecological Oncology at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital, Gateshead. He was awarded an MD from Newcastle University in 2002 for his work investigating the biology of the ovarian surface epithelium which led to his interest in ovarian cancer.

He was appointed as a consultant in Gateshead and honorary senior lecturer in Newcastle in 2005 and in January 2014 he took up the chair of Gynaecological Oncology at the University of Manchester.

His research focuses on developing personalised treatments for patients with advanced. In addition to developing personalised treatment algorithms to predict outcomes to surgery he leads a translational programme of research using ex vivo modelling of ovarian cancer to investigate how the DNA damage response can be used to develop potential therapeutic biomarkers. His group has developed techniques to establish real time models for ex vivo testing of drug sensitivity alongside functional assessment of the tumour and this has led to exciting developments in the ability to predict response to novel agents including PARP inhibitors as well as conventional chemotherapy agents such as carboplatin.

The Edmondson lab focuses on understanding the role of DNA damage repair in ovarian cancer. Cancer cells must be able to evade the normal processes of DNA damage repair in order to be able to survive, this is usually effected by an abrogation of one or more of the six DNA damage repair pathways. Understanding which pathways are competent and which are defective allows us to predict which chemotherapy agents are likely to have the greatest response. In particular we have been working with the new class of targeted agents called PARP inhibitors. This complements the work ongoing in the Jayson lab which focusses on the other class of targeted agent of interest in ovarian cancer, the anti angiogenic agents.

We have previously focussed on the role of homologous recombination, one of the double strand DNA damage repair pathways and its role in determining sensitivity to both platinum and PARP inhibitors. More recently we have been investigating non homologous end joining and we have now started work looking at nucleotide excision repair.

Our work uses primary cultures of ovarian cancer cells. These are collected from patients undergoing surgery at St Mary’s Hospital and then grown in our lab which is based on the same site.

Other work includes the development of biomarkers to predict hormone responsiveness in gynaecological cancers which is taking place in parallel with the PARAGON trial, a phase II trial of an aromatase inhibitor in gynaecological cancers.

Our work is funded by Cancer Research UK, Wellbeing of Women, Target Ovarian Cancer and the Emma Gyles Bursary Fund.

acdemic advisor, Women and Children's module, UoM

OSCE lead, Women and Children's module, UoM

We collaborate with the Jayson lab and the Gilham lab, both based at the Manchester Institute.

We continue to collaborate with the ovarian cancer research group at Newcastle University