UCL cancer trials to get £9m funding boost

Cancer Research UK is planning to invest nearly £9m over the next five years into research at the Cancer Research UK & UCL Cancer Trials Centre. The announcement is part of a £45 million investment into Cancer Research UK's network of clinical trials units across the UK, one of the charity's largest investments in clinical research to date. Professor Charles Swanton (UCL Cancer Institute and the Francis Crick Institute), Cancer Research UK's chief clinician, said: "Our clinical research enables us to translate discoveries from the lab in order to improve cancer diagnostics and treatments, giving more patients the best chance of beating their disease." "This is particularly important for patients with hard to treat cancers, including pancreatic, oesophageal, lung and brain tumours, where options for treatment are limited and survival rates remain poor." The £45m will be divided over five years across eight clinical trials units (CTUs) in Cardiff, Birmingham, Glasgow, Southampton, Leeds and London (at UCL, the Institute of Cancer Research, and Queen Mary University of London). One of the studies benefiting from the funding is TRACERx, led by Professor Swanton and Dr Mariam Jamal-Hanjani (UCL Cancer Institute), which aims to transform our understanding of non-small cell lung cancer and take a practical step towards precision medicine. The first findings of TRACERx were published last year, and found that unstable chromosomes within lung tumours increase the risk of cancer returning after surgery, and the researchers used the findings to detect relapse long before standard testing.