Research institutes have committed £5.5 million in funding for a world-leading research team tasked with making personalised medicines for bowel cancer patients
Bowel cancer is one of the most common types of cancer in the UK and is treated with a combination of surgery, chemotherapy, radiotherapy, and targeted medicine. The development of personalised medicine for bowel cancer holds great promise for enhancing both diagnosis and treatment, enabling more precise and effective care tailored to the individual characteristics of each patient.
Now, researchers from Cancer Research UK, Bowelbabe Fund for Cancer Research UK, philanthropic support from Bjorn Saven CBE and Inger Saven, and the Scientific Foundation of the Spanish Association Against Cancer (FCAECC) are teaming up for the CRC-STARS research initiative to support personalised medicine innovation.
“For over 100 years, Cancer Research UK-funded scientists have been working to beat bowel cancer, and this project is one of the most comprehensive for bowel cancer we have ever supported,” said Michelle Mitchell, our chief executive.
Personalised medicine will revolutionise bowel cancer care
Personalised medicine is currently used to treat certain breast cancers; however, its usage has not been expanded to other cancers. The CRC-STARS team will work together to learn more about how bowel cancer behaves so an individual patient can treat the cancer more personally.
The researchers aim to improve understanding about how different bowel cancers respond to current treatments, why certain bowel cancers spread, and whether they can predict what treatments work best for individual patients.
“We’re delighted to work with our colleagues across the UK and beyond in this new research partnership. Connecting early-stage discovery scientists working in laboratories with clinical researchers in hospitals and other clinical settings will allow us to look at bowel cancer more sophisticatedly than ever before. This will hopefully lead to better, more tailored treatments for this type of cancer and better patient outcomes,” said Professor Jenny Seligmann, Consultant Medical Oncologist, Professor of Gastrointestinal Oncology at the University of Leeds, and CRC-STARS research co-lead.
CRC-STARS will bring together 40 research experts from across the world
Experts from the UK, Spain, Italy, and Belgium will work together to find better treatments for bowel cancer patients, building upon the tools and resources developed by existing bowel cancer collaborations.
Professor Owen Sansom (Cancer Research UK Scotland Institute), Professor Jenny Seligmann (University of Leeds) and Professor Simon Leedham (University of Oxford) are the research co-leads for the team. This collaboration will enable them to use their combined expertise across multiple research areas and pair clinical trial data with cutting-edge technology.
“Step by step, daily, we’re discovering new ways to prevent, detect and treat bowel cancer and save lives. The support we’ve received from our funders will allow us to take bold steps towards better understanding bowel cancer and how to beat it,” said Professor Owen Sansom, Director of the Cancer Research UK Scotland Institute and CRC-STARS research co-lead.
“Treating cancer with radiotherapy and drugs can cause some tumours to change in response to the therapy adaptively. We think this can be responsible for the development of treatment resistance and will use all the tools and expertise available to us across the CRC-STARS team to understand this, so we can find new and better ways to treat the disease,” said Professor Simon Leedham, Professor of Molecular Genetics at University of Oxford, Honorary Consultant Gastroenterologist and CRC-STARS research co-lead.
