The quest for personalised cancer treatments has been handed

The quest for personalised cancer treatments has been handed an £8.5 million boost from the Wellcome Trust, which announced a UK-US alliance to find the best treatments for cancers.

The study will use some of the world’s pre-eminent cancer genome researchers to use state-of-the-art high throughput techniques to test the sensitivity of 1,000 cancer cell samples to hundreds of known and novel molecular anti-cancer treatments.

It will correlate these responses to the genes known to be driving the cancers. It is hoped that the results will drive a targeted approach to cancer by providing a catalogue of the most promising treatments for each of the cancer types based on the specific genetic alterations in these cancers.

This information will then be used to empower more informative clinical trials aiding the introduction of more targeted agents into the clinic.

“This significant and strategic project is aimed squarely at providing the first step towards tailored cancer therapy,” said Dr Ted Bianco, who is director of technology transfer at the Wellcome Trust, which provided funding for the five-year project.

“The ultimate target is to give doctors the tools to identify the best therapy for each individual patient according to the genetic characteristics of their particular tumour, rather than basing these decisions solely on where the tumour has developed.”

The project is being co-led by Professor Mike Stratton and Dr Andy Futreal of the Sanger Institute and Professors Jeff Settleman and Daniel Haber of Massachusetts General Hospital Cancer Center Boston, US.