Study of new personalised cancer therapies could ‘transform’ how the disease is treated

Scientists are embarking on a large-scale clinical study of new personalised cancer therapies which could give clinicians are real-time view 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 examining the effectiveness of new immunotherapy treatments and exploring new ways to detect 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 that will create five new hubs across the UK to develop new health technologies, including cheaper scanners, AI cancer diagnoses and testing new drugs more quickly through micro-dosing.

The Manifest project, led by the Crick Institute, will examine tumours 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 – might indicate whether someone has an undetected cancer or whether the disease might 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 tumours, 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 nearly 20 years.

“When I started, people were dying from advanced melanoma, usually within six months,” she said. Now more than half of people with advanced melanoma who 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 only been discovered so far to work against certain types of cancer. The Manifest project will focus on four: melanoma, kidney cancer, bladder cancer and triple negative breast cancer.

Prof Samra Turajlic: ‘We want to use the biomarkers to see whether the treatment will work or not.’ Photograph: Linkedin

There has been an explosion of immunotherapy treatments around the world, but studies are often done on such a small scale it can be hard for doctors to know which will be effective for particular 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 a huge complexity in the interaction between the cancer and immune system.

“So we’re going to take a very large number of measurements from patients: tumour samples, patients’ blood, from the microbiome, and combine that into a test to understand which has the most predictive power. That’s not something that’s been done at scale before.”

They will also be recruiting 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 Centre in Manchester and IMU Biosciences.

Other schemes at five hubs being created by UK Research and Innovation include portable imaging tools to help surgeons identify cancers and remove tumours, and a new cross-NHS digital pathology data network that will pool data for research teams to access.

“Cancer is a devastating disease that has touched every family in the UK, including my own,” said Peter Kyle, the science and technology secretary.

Those “amazing innovations … could transform the way we treat this awful disease and give hope to those facing it”, he added.

“They could open up capacity in our NHS, alleviating the pressures that we can all quite clearly see. They could put UK companies at the forefront of lucrative 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 unlocking the funding we need to do even more to back our innovators, and invest in our public services.”

Wes Streeting, the health and social care secretary, said: “As a cancer survivor, I know how vital 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.”