Improving cancer care
1 Aug 2011 by Evoluted New Media
Molecular diagnostics testing has the ability to predict in advance how patients will respond to a given treatment, and now the UK could potentially become the world leader in personalised medicine
Molecular diagnostics testing has the ability to predict in advance how patients will respond to a given treatment, and now the UK could potentially become the world leader in personalised medicine
Six collaborative research and development projects have received a £5.8m investment from the Technology Strategy Board to carry out research and development in tumour profiling and data capture.
Molecular and genomic technologies – together with an understanding of the underlying disease mechanism – will identify which patients will response positively to certain treatments. The research will provide cancer specialists with information specific to their patient’s tumour and these patients can then be grouped according to how they might respond to a given treatment – a process called stratification. It is hoped Stratified Medicine will ultimately improve cancer care.
“Routine comprehensive profiling of tumours upon diagnosis has the potential to open up more effective treatment options and, together with related clinical data, could dramatically increase our understanding of the power of targeted therapies, which could then be applied to drug development,” said Iain Gray, chief executive of the Technology Strategy Board. “These projects will lead to the development of products or services which can be readily adopted by NHS commissioners, for the improvement of patient outcomes.”
Commercial solutions from these projects will be used by Cancer Research UK’s Stratified Medicines Programme, which aims to test up to 9,000 tumour samples to demonstrate how molecular diagnostic of NHS patients’ tumours could be scaled up to provide a national service.
“Investing in tumour profiling will give us new ways to test tumours in the NHS, and the data capture work will allow us to develop better targeted cancer treatments in the future,” said James Peach, director of Cancer Research UK’s Stratified Medicines Programme.
“All of these investments fit with the Cancer Research UK programme, which will demonstrate how these technologies can be used in practice to help cancer patients. This is a great example of national collaboration across the public, private and charity sectors, all working together to beat cancer.”
The projects will be led by Affymertrix UK, Aridhia Informatives, IDBS, Life Technologies Corporation, Oxford Gene Technology and Source BioScience UK. The funding is the latest stage of a five-year initiative investigating personalised medicine, and the third to be made through the Technology Strategy Board-managed Stratified Medicine Innovation Platform (SMIP).
