Six new collaborative research and development projects are set to receive nearly £6 million of Government funding in the latest stage of a five year initiative to ensure that the UK is a world leader in the development of personalised medicine.
The projects to receive funding from the Technology Strategy Board will carry out R&D in the areas of tumour profiling and data capture with the aim of helping to improve cancer care by providing cancer specialists with information specific to their patient’s tumour, enabling more targeted treatment to be provided. Iain Gray, chief executive of the Technology Strategy Board, said: “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. 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.” The commercial solutions from these projects will support the aims of Cancer Research UK’s own Stratified Medicines Programme, which aims to test up to 9,000 tumour samples in order to demonstrate how molecular diagnosis of NHS patient’s tumours could be scaled up to provide a national service, while also linking the genetic and clinical data from consenting patients to inform research in the future.
