Scientists are launching a large-scale clinical trial of new personalized cancer therapies that could give doctors real-time insight into how well treatments are working.
The £9m partnership between the Francis Crick Institute, five NHS trusts, charities and life sciences companies will last four years to study the effectiveness of new immunotherapy treatments and discover new ways to diagnose of cancer.
The scheme is one of several new research projects given the go-ahead by the UK's Department of Science, Innovation and Technology as part of a £118m package which will set up five new centers in the UK to develop new health technologies, including -cheap scanners, cancer diagnosis with artificial intelligence and faster testing of new drugs through microdoses.
The Manifest project, led by the Crick Institute, will examine tumors and blood samples from 3,000 patients who have suffered from cancer in an attempt to identify which biomarkers - such as genes, proteins or molecules - can indicate whether someone has undetected cancer or the disease may return.
This could boost the effectiveness of a new wave of immunotherapy cancer treatments. Immunotherapy is considered a promising type of cancer treatment because it stimulates the patient's immune system to destroy tumors, rather than "cut, burn, poison" as in surgery, radiation therapy and chemotherapy.
Professor Samra Turadzic, clinical group leader at the Crick Institute and consultant in medical oncology at the Royal Marsden Hospital, has been treating melanoma - skin cancer - for nearly 20 years.
"When I started, people were dying of advanced melanoma, usually within six months," she says. Now, more than half of people with advanced melanoma who receive immunotherapy survive for at least 10 years.
The problem is, Turadzic says, "We don't know who will benefit and who will just have side effects." And so far, immunotherapies have only been found to work against certain types of cancer. Project Manifest will focus on four: melanoma, kidney cancer, bladder cancer and triple-negative breast cancer.
There are a large number of immunotherapy treatments in the world, but often studies are conducted on such a small scale that it can be difficult for doctors to know which ones 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 will work or not," Turadzic says. "We think that no single biomarker will give us the answer because there is enormous complexity in the interaction between cancer and the immune system." So we're going to take a very large number of measurements from patients: tumor samples, patient blood, from the microbiome, and combine them in a test to see which has the most predictive power. It's not something that's been done on a large scale before."
In addition, they will recruit a further 3,000 patients through partnerships with the Royal Marsden and Barts Cancer Institute in London, Christie in Manchester, NHS Lothian in Edinburgh and University Hospitals in Cambridge. Other partners include Cancer Research UK's Biomarker Center in Manchester and IMU Biosciences. | BGNES
