Cancer Research UK is investing £16 million in four collaborations over the next five years to encourage the development of new methods for understanding and treating cancers that are associated with low survival rates.
“We were really impressed by how the researchers have united their expertise to provide an extra boost to tackle cancers that are hard to treat, like brain and lung cancer,” Dr. Iain Foulkes, executive director for research funding at Cancer Research UK, said in a statement.
The Cancer Research UK UCL Centre will receive £4 million to launch a national postmortem tissue bank from patients with metastatic cancer that was difficult to treat. That information is useful for better understanding the progression and final stages of the disease.
The bank will also be helpful for researching the genetics of brain tumors that are hard to take samples from when the patients are alive. Scientists will be able to understand how tumors develop and spread, how and why they become resistant to treatment, how the body responds to the disease in the final stages and how to boost the immune system to combat the disease in the future.
The Cancer Research UK ICR Centre will receive over £4 million to investigate the best way to deliver three advanced radiotherapy techniques to patients with esophageal and lung cancer that is difficult to treat and has low survival rates. Experts will be trained on the best ways to deliver stereotactic ablative radiotherapy, image-guided radiotherapy and proton beam therapy to patients, and to develop technology.
The Cancer Research UK Southampton Centre will also get about £4 million to study how tumors respond to immunotherapy. The goal is to find patients who are the most likely to benefit from that kind of treatment as well as how to make it more effective.
In particular, the scientists will investigate new ways to treat lung and esophageal cancers with immunotherapy. Experts will also be trained to identify the genetic code of tumors.
The Cancer Research UK Edinburgh Centre will also receive about £4 million to study the most common types of brain tumors and develop a research resource. Scientists will use samples from patients’ tumors during surgery to grow the brain tumor cells in the lab in order to study the defective molecules that lead to the disease.
Cancer Research UK also published research last week on why some breast cancers are hard to treat. Scientists have uncovered new genetic information about how breast cancer develops and the genetic changes that are associated with survival.
The University of Cambridge received funding from the organization to analyze tumor samples from a study that found that breast cancer can be classified as 10 different diseases in order to get a better understanding of the genetic faults of those 10 sub-types.
The researchers found 40 mutated genes that cause breast cancer to progress and only a portion of these genes were previously known to be involved in breast cancer development. They also found that one of the more common mutated genes called PIK3CA is associated with lower chances of survival for three of the 10 breast cancer subgroups.
"Our research continues to highlight just how complicated cancers are, but we are managing to solve these puzzles faster than ever,” Peter Johnson, Cancer Research UK's chief clinician, said in a statement.
