| Dear Voornaam, Welcome to your weekly Cancer Research UK Research Update email.
Cancer is a global problem that demands global collaboration. Cancer Grand Challenges is our bold solution – a funding initiative co-funded and now co-founded with the National Cancer Institute in the US – that provides teams with £20m to come together, think differently and take on some of cancer’s toughest challenges.
Today I’m delighted to announce 4 new Cancer Grand Challenges teams. The teams join a growing global community of more than 700 investigators taking on 10 challenges, representing 10 teams across 10 countries and nearly 70 research institutions.
At a time when Cancer Research UK is seeking to support greater international collaboration, we recognise how frustrating the delay around the UK’s association with Horizon Europe continues to be for many in our research community. We’re monitoring the situation closely and will continue to call for UK association to the funding programme and communicate your priorities to the government. Please do ask your EU-based collaborators to act via the Stick to Science campaign. If you would like to discuss in more detail or to provide a case study, please contact our press team.
Also, after two years of virtual meetings, the Early Detection of Cancer Conference is back in person in Portland this October. We're inviting researchers to submit abstracts and we're offering travel bursaries for selected students and postdocs. We hope to see many of you there.
Kind regards, Iain Foulkes Executive Director Research & Innovation CEO Cancer Research Horizons Cancer Research UK |
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CHALLENGE: CACHEXIA Team: Cancer Cachexia Action Network (CANCAN), co-led by Eileen White (Rutgers Cancer Institute of New Jersey, US), Marcus DaSilva Goncalves (Weill Cornell Medicine, US) and Tobias Janowitz (Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, US) with investigators across the UK and US
Cachexia, the debilitating wasting syndrome people often experience in the later stages of cancer, imparts poor prognosis. Building on the hypothesis that cachexia is driven by metabolic imbalance, the CANCAN team will investigate the role of metabolism, tumour-secreted factors and food regulation to better understand cachexia biology, define clinical subtypes and develop novel therapies. |
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CHALLENGE: SOLID TUMOURS IN CHILDREN Team: NexTGen, led by Martin Pule (University College London) and Catherine Bollard (Children’s National Hospital, US), with investigators across the UK, US and France
Survival for children with solid tumours has seen little improvement for more than 30 years. NexTGen hopes to build a much deeper understanding of the unique vulnerabilities of childhood tumours – including aberrant glycosylation, the ‘dark antigens’ expressed from usually silent regions of the genome and the microenvironment – to engineer novel CAR T-cell therapies for children with these cancers, and test in early-stage clinical studies. |
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CHALLENGE: EXTRACHROMOSOMAL DNA Team: eDyNAmiC, led by Paul Mischel (Stanford University, US) with investigators across the UK, US and Germany
Present in around 1 in 3 cancers, ecDNA enables tumours to rapidly evolve their genome, driving tumour heterogeneity that results in treatment resistance and promoting aggressive tumour behaviour and poorer outcomes for patients. Using multi-regional tumour sequencing, single-cell omics, live-cell imaging, computational modelling and more, eDyNAmiC aims to understand how ecDNA subverts conventional evolution and enables tumour cells to thrive. This will hopefully lead the team to identify targetable vulnerabilities for ecDNA-driven cancers – some of the hardest types of cancer to treat. |
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CHALLENGE: NORMAL PHENOTYPES Team: PROMINENT, led by Allan Balmain (University of California, San Francisco), Paul Brennan (IARC, France) and Nuria Lopez Bigas (IRB Barcelona, Spain), with investigators across the UK, US and Spain
Recent findings indicate cells can harbour many oncogenic mutations and remain phenotypically normal, and some carcinogens can cause cancer without damaging DNA. This team will explore the promoter hypothesis, an alternative model of carcinogenesis in which cells are initiated by mutations but remain dormant until a promoting factor such as inflammation triggers the process to malignancy. They will then build a roadmap of early cancer development, looking for new routes to prevention. |
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FUNDING AND RESEARCH OPPORTUNITIES |
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| | | Applications accepted all-year round |
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| | | Applications accepted all-year round |
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PRESENT YOUR WORK AT THE EARLY DETECTION OF CANCER CONFERENCE: 18–20 OCTOBER We’re providing 5 complimentary registrations and travel bursaries for UK-based students and postdocs whose abstracts are selected for the Early Detection of Cancer Conference.
Submit an abstract by 19 August to be considered for a lightning talk, with general abstract submission closing on 2 September.
This year’s conference will take place in Portland, Oregon. Join the brightest minds in cancer research to discuss, debate and share the latest thinking and results in early detection research. |
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 WHAT ARE THE GAPS IN COLORECTAL RESEARCH? The NCRI Colorectal Group is setting new strategic research priorities to address the most pressing needs in colorectal research.
And to do this, they need your help. They are calling on the cancer community to submit information on the most important unanswered questions in this field. |
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|  RESEARCH FEATURE: NEW INSIGHTS INTO HOW CHEMOTHERAPY CAUSES CACHEXIA Published this week, we spoke to Ketan Patel about how the field of cachexia research was galvanised following publication of 4 seminal Nature papers in 2017.
Ketan and his team have now elucidated the steps linking the genetic defect in Cockayne Syndrome with the onset of cachexia and, importantly for cancer researchers, have shown parallel responses in mice fed the chemotherapy drug cisplatin. |
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| | NEW THINKING ABOUT DCIS AND BREAST CANCER PROGRESSION A surprising finding was published in Nature Genetics last week (9 June) by Esther Lipps, Elinor Sawyer and Jelle Wesseling of the Cancer Grand Challenges PRECISION team.
They performed genomic analysis of initial ductal carcinoma in situ (DCIS) lesions and paired invasive recurrent tumours in 95 patients and found 18% of invasive recurrence was clonally unrelated to the DCIS.
This has implications for accurate risk evaluation of DCIS, treatment de-escalation strategies and for identifying predictive biomarkers for invasive progression. |
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| | | CRUK early diagnosis research virtual spotlight presenting International Cancer Benchmarking Partnership research, chaired by Yoryos Lyratzopoulos, UCL Online 2:00 PM 27 June 2022 |
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| | | Cambridge UK, and online 28 June 2022 |
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| | | Technical webinar from the Cancer Research Horizons AstraZeneca Antibody Alliance Laboratory Online 1:30 PM 05 July 2022 |
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| | | London, UK 05 September 2022 |
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| | | Empowering the next generation London, UK 10 October 2022 |
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| | | Portland, Oregon, USA 18 October 2022 |
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| | | Manchester, UK 15 November 2022 |
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