Led by: Prof Henning Walczak

Lead centre: UCL

Year awarded: 2015

Value: £5 million

Vision: To establish a state-of-the-art immune-monitoring and discovery hub to maximise the potential of immunotherapeutics to cure more cancers sooner. By building both a discovery and a translational research team, the consortium will work together to create new immunotherapies and validate potential therapeutic targets and treatment combinations.

Led by: Prof Richard Treisman

Lead centre: The Francis Crick Institute

Year awarded: 2015

Value: £4.2 million

Vision: To harness the excellent research environment at the Francis Crick to Develop a unique clinical research fellow training programme and to deliver support to researchers working on molecular archeology, cancer immunotherapy, and targets for ovarian cancer therapies. 

Led by: Prof Kevin Harrington

Lead centre: ICR

Year awarded: 2016

Value: £4.3 million

Vision: To optimise and harmonise the use of of new advanced radiotherapy technologies as they transition to the clinic, to improve patient access to state-of-the-art radiotherapy. By working as a network, the team will establish a national cooperative around these new technologies (SABR, MR-Linac and Proton Beam) and create a digital platform to enable adaptive treatment planning and protocol development. The team will also support a training programme to invest in the next generation of radiation oncologists.

Led by: Dr Steve Pollard

Lead centre: Edinburgh

Year awarded: 2016

Value: £3.7 million

Vision: To generate a new collection of tools to explore human glioma and underpin a new era of functional studies in brain cancer. The international glioma cellular genetics resource (GCGR) combines high quality primary cellular glioblastoma models and normal stem cells controls, with a state-of-the-art genome editing facility, to develop an open source database for the glioma community. They will also support a training programme that will be co-supervised by developmental neurobiologists at the Francis Crick Institute

Led by: Profs Helen Reeves and Derek Mann

Lead centre: Newcastle

Year awarded: 2018

Value: £5 million

Funded by​: CRUK, AIRC, AECC

Vision: To develop tools to enable the research community to answer specic questions centred on stratication, monitoring and improvement of immunotherapy for hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC). They are collecting tissue and data; characterising the immunogenomic HCC microenvironment; developing preclinical animal and human models; and delivering a PhD training programme.

Led by: Dr Francesca Demichelis

Lead centre: University of Trento

Year awarded: 2018

Value: £5 million

Funded by: CRUK, AIRC

Vision: To develop a liquid biopsy for prostate cancer. The test will use integrated genomic, epigenomic and RNA data to understand tumour evolution and treatment resistance. It will provide a vital tool for doctors and researchers in facilitating patient stratification in future clinical trials

Led by: Prof Owen Sansom

Lead centre: Glasgow

Year awarded: 2018

Value: £5 million

Funded by: CRUK, AIRC, AECC

Vision: To bring together a European-wide consortium at the forefront of colorectal cancer research to align and interrogate a suite of state-of-the art preclinical models. The team will aim to generate robust and reproducible preclinical data to de-risk future clinical trials based on patient stratification.   

Led by: Dr Giovanni Tonon

Lead centre: Fondazione Centre San Raffaele

Year awarded: 2018

Value: £4.8 million

Funded by: CRUK, AIRC

Vision: To deliver tools and devices that could be promptly implemented in a clinical setting, to pre-emptively intercept treatment resistance in individual cancer patients. The team will combine cancer evolution modelling, new single-cell approaches and novel microfluidic devices, as well as new data integration techniques, with the aim of providing a definitive single-cell portrait of tumor cells, before and after treatment.

Led by: Professor Shonit Punwani

Lead centre: UCL

Year awarded: 2018

Funded by: CRUK

Vision: To accelerate the development of standardised imaging techniques through harmonised image acquisition, processing and analysis tools. NCITA brings together 9 leading institutions in the field of cancer imaging to enable the evaluation and qualification of a pipeline of novel imaging biomarkers through multicentre clinical trials. The award supports 3 complementary cross-institution units: the NCITA Trials Unit, NCITA QA/QC Unit and the NCITA Image Repository Unit. The vision is that these will work in synergy to establish a certified development pipeline for quantitative cancer imaging biomarkers, from concept to clinic.

Led by: Professor Caroline Dive

Lead centre: Manchester

Year awarded: 2019

Value: £4.4m

Funded by: CRUK, AIRC, AECC

Vision:
1.Scientific: Through the digitisation of experimental cancer medicine trials, the translatability of pre-clinical observations to clinical trials will increase by reducing false-negatives arising from insensitive experimental methodology
2. Capability/Infrastructure: To remain a competitive experimental medicine network in Europe to sponsors whose key driver in Phase 1 is to have near-real time access to data from patients recruited and to hypothesis generate and test from the emerging clinical trial dataset

Led by: Professor Alberto Orfao

Lead centre: Centro de Investigación del Cáncer de Salamanca (CIC)

Year awarded: 2019

Value: £4.8m

Funded by: CRUK, AIRC, AECC

Vision: The ultimate goal of the proposal is to accelerate research and foster the development, transfer and adoption of novel preventive measures, early diagnosis and monitoring procedures, and to anticipate potential beneficial therapeutic interventions for MBL-CLL and MGUS-MM subjects-patients, as a model also for other hematological and non-hematological cancers.

Led by: Professor Paul French

Lead centre: Imperial

Year awarded: 2019

Value: £4.5m

Funded by: CRUK, AECC

Vision: We aim to explore the trade-off between complexity of 3D cancer models and power of assays (in terms of single cell resolution and throughput) by developing modular open source automated instrumentation optimised for 3D imaging of complex cell cultures with a range of optical properties. We will also explore cell culture and sample preparation (e.g. labelling, mounting, clearing) techniques to enable researchers to optimise 3D assays to address their specific cancer biology questions.

Led by: Professor Robin Jones

Lead centre: ICR

Year awarded: 2019

Value: £2.5m

Funded by: CRUK, AIRC, AECC

Vision: The vision is to deliver datasets, data mining tools and patient-derived models that will drive the development of a stratified medicine approach for personalised NCT in high-risk STS patients. This will be achieved through 3 interrelated programs.1)Develop a common data platform to enable standardised clinicopathological and imaging data collection and curation of STS clinical specimens. 2)Generate molecular datasets and models that shed light on the biological processes impacting tumour response to NCT and 3)Develop a suite of data mining tools to facilitate analysis and integration of clinical and molecular data for use by the sarcoma community.

Led by: Professor Ignacio Melero

Lead centre: Universidad de Navarra

Year awarded: 2019

Value: £3.8m

Funded by: CRUK, AIRC, AECC

Vision: Synergistic combinations of radiotherapy and immunotherapy have been reported preclinically and hinted in case reports and early clinical trials. This project aims to test intratumour injection of immunotherapy agents and external radiotherapy to assess efficacy and mechanisms of action. The main objective is to comparatively identify the most powerful treatment strategy, addressing the immune mechanisms of action underlying efficacy and resitance. Three clinical trials are proposed encompassing radiotherapy (SABRT or Proton beam) in conjunction with intratumoral injection of pathogen-denoting molecular patterns already undergoing clinical development of intralesional delivery as immunotherapy agents.