Scientists begin a large-scale clinical study of new personal cancer therapies that clinicians can give is a real-time picture of how well treatments are working.
The £9m partnership between the Francis Crick Institute, five NHS Trusts, charities and bioscience companies will spend four years investigating the effectiveness of new immunotherapy treatments and investigating new ways of detecting cancer.
The scheme is one of several new research projects given the green light by the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology as part of a £118m package which will create five new hubs across the UK to develop new health technologies, including cheaper scanners , AI cancer diagnoses and tests new drugs faster through microdosing.
The Manifest project, led by the Crick Institute, will examine tumors and blood samples from 3,000 cancer patients in an attempt to identify which biomarkers – such as genes, proteins or molecules – can indicate whether someone has an undetected have cancer and whether the disease may 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 tumors, rather than the “cut, burn, poison” approaches of surgery, radiotherapy and chemotherapy.
Prof Samra Turajlic, clinical group leader at the Crick Institute and a consultant medical oncologist at the Royal Marsden Hospital, has been treating melanoma, a skin cancer, for almost 20 years.
“When I started, people were dying of advanced melanoma, usually within six months,” she said. Now more than half of people with advanced melanoma receive immunotherapy survive for at least 10 years.
The problem is, Turajlic said, “We don’t know who will benefit and who will just have side effects.” And immunotherapies have so far 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 conducted on such a small scale that it can be difficult for doctors to know which will be effective for specific patients. Biomarkers offer a potential solution.
“What we want to use the biomarkers for is to say whether the treatment is going to work or not,” Turajlic said. “We believe that no single biomarker is really going to give us the answer, because there is great complexity in the interaction between the cancer and the immune system.
“So we are going to take a very large number of measurements from patients: tumor samples, patients’ blood, from the microbiome, and combine them in a test to understand which has the most predictive power. It’s not something that’s been done at scale before.”
They will also recruit 3,000 more patients through partnerships with the Royal Marsden and Barts Cancer Institute in London, the Christie in Manchester, NHS Lothian in Edinburgh and Cambridge University Hospitals. Other partners include the Cancer Research UK Biomarker Center in Manchester and IMU Biosciences.
Other schemes at five hubs being created by UK Research and Innovation include wearable imaging tools to help surgeons identify cancers and remove tumours, and a new cross-NHS digital pathology data network which will pool data for research teams to access .
“Cancer is a devastating disease that has affected every family in the UK, including my own,” said Peter Kyle, the science and technology secretary.
Those “incredible innovations … could change the way we treat this horrible disease and give hope to those facing it”, he added.
“They can open up capacity in our NHS, easing the pressures we can all see very clearly. They can put British companies at the forefront of profitable emerging industries.
“They have the potential to grow the economy – leveraging our health system and research sector as an engine room for growth – and in turn unlock the funding we need to do even more to support our innovators and in investing in our public services.”
Health and Social Care Secretary Wes Streeting said: “As a cancer survivorI know how essential an early cancer diagnosis and the latest treatments are. This investment will not only save lives, but also secure Britain’s status as a powerhouse for life sciences and medical technology.”
