Liverpool University joins EU cancer consortium

Liverpool University’s Institute of Translational Medicine is to become a partner in a new European consortium created to fight eye cancer.

The Consortium, UM Cure 2020, involves 12 partners and has received more than £5m of funding from the EU’s Horizon 2020 research programme. The five-year programme will aim to identify new approaches to treat uveal melanoma — eye cancer.

Uveal melanoma (UM), although rare, is the most common primary eye cancer in adults. Although the initial tumour can be treated effectively, almost 50% of patients develop secondary tumours, often in the liver, for which there is no effective therapy. Patients with metastatic UM require specialised treatments to improve their survival chances.

Professor Sarah Coupling, director of the North West Cancer Research Centre at Liverpool University, said: “The centre of the UM Cure 2020 approach is to characterise tumour tissue from UM patients with metastases, in order to define actionable targets. Underpinning this will be the UM Cure 2020 virtual biobank registry, linking biobanks in four referral centres involved into a harmonised network.

“To achieve its goal the consortium proposes an innovative concept placing the patient central in the therapy development process. While the pharmaceutical industry mainly focuses on developing drugs that may work in as many tumour types as possible, this approach only rarely results in drugs that work in rare tumours such as UM.”

The centres will collect primary and metastatic UM samples for thorough characterisation. Single drugs or combinations of them that show promise in preclinical data will be put forward for clinical trials. The other three UM Cure 2020 centres that collect biosamples are in Paris (Institut Curie), Leiden (Leiden University Medical Centre) and Krakow (Jagiellonian University).