A large-scale collaborative study of personalised cancer therapies could offer clinicians a real-time view of how well treatments are working, say scientists, and decide how best to tackle the disease.
The £9m partnership between the Francis Crick Institute, five NHS trusts, charities and bioscience companies will spend four years examining the effectiveness of new immunotherapy treatments and exploring new ways to detect cancer, reports The Guardian.
The scheme is one of several research projects approved by the British Department for Science, Innovation & Technology as part of a £118m package that will create five new hubs across the UK to develop health technologies, including cheaper scanners, AI cancer diagnoses and testing new drugs more quickly through micro-dosing.
The Manifest project, led by the Crick Institute, will examine tumours and blood samples from 3 000 patients who have had cancer in an attempt to identify which biomarkers – such as genes, proteins or molecules – might indicate whether someone has an undetected cancer or whether the disease is likely to return.
This could make the new wave of immunotherapy cancer treatments more effective. Immunotherapy is seen as a promising form of cancer treatment because it stimulates a patient’s immune system to kill tumours, rather than the “cut, burn, poison” approaches of surgery, radiotherapy and chemotherapy.
Professor Samra Turajlic, clinical group leader at the Crick Institute and a consultant medical oncologist at the Royal Marsden hospital, has been treating melanoma for nearly 20 years.
“When I started, people were dying from advanced melanoma, usually within six months,” she said. Now more than half of those with advanced melanoma who receive immunotherapy survive for at least 10 years.
“The problem is, we don’t know who will benefit and who will just have side effects.”
And so far, immunotherapies have only been discovered to work against certain types of cancer. The Manifest project will focus on four: melanoma, kidney cancer, bladder cancer and triple negative breast cancer.
There has been an explosion of immunotherapy treatments around the world, but studies are often done on such a small scale it can be hard for doctors to know which will be effective for particular patients. Biomarkers offer a potential solution.
“We want to use the biomarkers …to say whether the treatment is going to work or not,” Turajlic added. “We believe no single biomarker is really going to give us the answer, because there is a huge complexity in the interaction between the cancer and immune system.
“So we’re going to take a very large number of measurements from patients: tumour samples, patients’ blood, from the microbiome, and combine that into a test to understand which has the most predictive power. That’s not something that’s been done at scale before.”
They will also be recruiting 3 000 more patients through partnerships with the Royal Marsden and Barts Cancer Institute in London, The Christie Foundation Trust in Manchester, NHS Lothian in Edinburgh, and Cambridge University Hospitals. Other partners include the Cancer Research UK Biomarker Centre in Manchester and IMU Biosciences.
Other schemes at five hubs being created by UK Research and Innovation include portable imaging tools to help surgeons identify cancers and remove tumours, and a new cross-NHS digital pathology data network that will pool data for research teams to access.
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