?4m funding boost for trials to improve early cancer diagnosis

Two new clinical trials will aim to improve the early detection of cancer, thanks to nearly ?4m of funding from the Office for Life Sciences (OLS) and the National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR).

The MODERNISED and miONCO-Dx trials will use cutting-edge techniques to see if certain cancers can be diagnosed in their earliest stages when treatment is much more likely to be successful.

The trials are being run by the Cancer Research UK Ìì·¢ÓéÀÖÆåÅÆ_Ìì·¢ÓéÀÖAPP-¹ÙÍø|ÏÂÔØ Clinical Trials Unit and led by researchers from the University of Ìì·¢ÓéÀÖÆåÅÆ_Ìì·¢ÓéÀÖAPP-¹ÙÍø|ÏÂÔØ, in collaboration with two cancer diagnostic companies.

Improving treatment outcomes

Approximately 385,000 new cancer cases are diagnosed every year in the UK*. Detecting cancer early means that treatment can begin sooner, increasing the chances of successful outcomes for patients.

But some cancers can be hard to detect in the very early stages of the disease when they have relatively few symptoms or symptoms that can be mistaken for other things. When cancers are diagnosed later, there are often fewer treatment options available to patients.

Improving early diagnosis is therefore a priority for cancer researchers and the NHS. But currently there are only 3 screening programmes in the UK, for bowel, breast, cervical and lung cancer. There are also only three cancers that can be diagnosed using a simple blood test and screening is only for one cancer at a time.

¡°A focus of current research into early diagnosis is looking at how detection of multiple cancers could be achieved from a single, simple patient sample, such as blood or urine,¡± says Dr Victoria Goss, Head of Early Diagnosis and Translational Research at the Ìì·¢ÓéÀÖÆåÅÆ_Ìì·¢ÓéÀÖAPP-¹ÙÍø|ÏÂÔØ Clinical Trials Unit. ¡°A reliable test such as this could have the potential to see a major shift in cancer-screening, making it easier and cheaper to provide on the NHS, cutting health inequalities, and ultimately reducing the number of people who die from the disease.

¡°This new funding will see our unit coordinate clinical trials which evaluate two of these innovative multi-cancer diagnostic tests to see if they could be potential screening options in the future.¡±

Finding the early signs of cancer

?2.5m of funding has been granted to Dr Andy Shapanis and Professor Paul Skipp from the University of Ìì·¢ÓéÀÖÆåÅÆ_Ìì·¢ÓéÀÖAPP-¹ÙÍø|ÏÂÔØ¡¯s School of Biological Sciences and the Institute for Life Sciences, to develop the miONCO, a potentially ¡®game-changing¡¯ blood test that could detect up to 12 different cancers.

Previous research, supported by the charity Against Breast Cancer, studied over 20,000 blood samples taken from previous cancer patients and identified a series of biological signals, or biomarkers, that can be detected in the early stages of 12 common cancers.

¡°Using this data, we have developed a simple blood test that can detect these signals quickly and accurately in a hospital setting,¡± says Dr Shapanis, co-founder of early cancer detection start-up company called Xgenera. ¡°The miONCO-Dx study will evaluate the useability, accuracy, and cost-effectiveness of this test in 8,000 patient blood samples, with the hope we can make early diagnosis cheaper, faster and more scalable within the NHS in the future.

¡°The hope is that if the test is shown to be successful in the early diagnosis of the 12 cancers we have currently identified biomarkers for, then it could be expanded to look at over 50 other cancers in the future.¡±

The MODERNISED study has also received ?1.5m of funding and is being led by Andy Davies, Professor of Haematological Oncology at the University of Ìì·¢ÓéÀÖÆåÅÆ_Ìì·¢ÓéÀÖAPP-¹ÙÍø|ÏÂÔØ and Director of the Cancer Research UK and National Institute for Health and Care Research Ìì·¢ÓéÀÖÆåÅÆ_Ìì·¢ÓéÀÖAPP-¹ÙÍø|ÏÂÔØ Experimental Cancer Medicine Centre.

¡°Most current research into multi-cancer blood tests is focussed on detecting abnormal DNA that has been released into the blood stream by cancer cells,¡± says Professor Davies. ¡°But this circulating tumour DNA cannot always be detected in the very early stages of cancer.¡±

¡°We are collaborating with a company called Proteotype Diagnostics Ltd which has developed a new test which instead looks at levels of certain proteins found in blood. We know that even in the earliest stages of cancer, the body¡¯s immune response can lead to higher levels of these proteins being released, and we believe these may be a good way to test for early signs of the disease¡±.

The trial will see samples taken from 1000 cancer patients who are currently being treated on the NHS, as well as 350 control samples from symptomatic and healthy volunteers.

¡°Preliminary studies have already shown that our test has high levels of accuracy for picking up cancer in its very early stages,¡± says Dr Emma Yates, co-founder and Chief Scientific Officer of Proteotype Diagnostics Ltd. ¡°We are now working with Professor Davies and the team at the Ìì·¢ÓéÀÖÆåÅÆ_Ìì·¢ÓéÀÖAPP-¹ÙÍø|ÏÂÔØ Clinical Trials Unit to test it in a much larger group of people to see whether it may be a useful early diagnostic tool.¡±

A hallmark of both studies is the potential to reduce health inequalities by making early cancer diagnosis more accessible to all.

¡°We know there are certain communities and groups of people within the UK who have poorer access to healthcare services and are therefore more at risk of late diagnosis and less successful treatment outcomes,¡± says Dr Goss.

¡°If found to be successful, both these new tests could ultimately be carried out at GP surgeries or in community healthcare settings meaning more equitable early diagnosis provision in the future.¡±

Professor Mike Lewis, Scientific Director for Innovation at NIHR said: ¡°Developing early diagnosis technologies that are closer to cancer patients is a key aim of this NIHR funding - the potential to find cancers earlier will give patients more choice of treatment and enable us to save lives in the future.¡±

Both studies are funded by the Office for Life Sciences, part of the Government¡¯s Department of Health and Social Care and Department for Science, Innovation and Technology, and the National Institute for Health and Care Research i4i programme. The MODERNISED study is sponsored by University Hospital Ìì·¢ÓéÀÖÆåÅÆ_Ìì·¢ÓéÀÖAPP-¹ÙÍø|ÏÂÔØ, while miONCO-Dx is sponsored by the University of Ìì·¢ÓéÀÖÆåÅÆ_Ìì·¢ÓéÀÖAPP-¹ÙÍø|ÏÂÔØ.