A pan cancer programme of tumour typing (version 1)
Research type
Research Study
Full title
Determination of genetic, transcriptomic, proteomic and image analysis based identification of pharmacological targets for the treatment of various cancers.
IRAS ID
294661
Contact name
Nicolas M Orsi
Contact email
Sponsor organisation
University of Leeds
Duration of Study in the UK
4 years, 11 months, 31 days
Research summary
We have conducted a pilot study on ovarian cancer aimed at developing new, more effective treatments. Due to its success, we plan to expand its remit to cover various other cancer types including breast, lung, skin, reproductive, blood and gastrointestinal cancers. The outlook for the sufferers of the 200 cancer types, which affect 1 in 2 people within the UK in their lifetime, remains dismal. Lung cancer alone is responsible for 35,300 deaths each year, with only 9.5% of patients surviving 10 years or more after diagnosis. Survival rates have improved by a bleak 2% in the last 40 years. Low cancer survival rates occur for many reasons such as the disease being rarely diagnosed until it spreads and presents at more advanced stages and when therapeutic intervention is invariably less effective, calling for a need to develop more effective targeted therapies. A better understanding of the genetic blueprint defects and the pathways leading to abnormal protein expression are key to this effort, as part of both academic and pharmaceutical corporate research programmes aimed at developing new drugs. This project addresses both of these strategies by providing surplus archival cancer tissue samples and electronically scanned tissue slides with anonymised case-specific demographic annotations to a commercial partner who is funding the project, TriStar. In turn, TriStar will distribute these materials and images to pharmaceutical companies actively engaged in cancer drug development programmes, whilst returning a replica of all the material collected and processed to Leeds, where it will be made available for academic research programmes. For example, where TriStar will create two tissue microarrays (TMAs), one of these will be returned to Leeds. In parallel These research endeavours will involve an array of research techniques, including genetic, transcriptomic and proteomic approaches.
REC name
Wales REC 5
REC reference
21/WA/0089
Date of REC Opinion
29 Mar 2021
REC opinion
Favourable Opinion