UK government to support six research projects with £6m of funding
The Technology Strategy Board will fund projects in the areas of tumour profiling and data capture
Six new collaborative research and development projects are set to receive nearly £6m of funding from the UK government in the latest stage of a major five-year initiative to ensure that the country is a world leader in the development of personalised medicine.
The Technology Strategy Board will fund projects in the areas of tumour profiling and data capture, which will help to improve cancer care by providing specialists with information specific to their patient’s tumour, enabling more targeted treatment to be provided.
The investment is the third to be made through the Technology Strategy Board-managed Stratified Medicine Innovation Platform (SMIP), an initiative that will oversee an investment of more than £60m of government funding over five years in innovative research and development. The first investments, totalling £3.7m, were in the fields of inflammatory biomarkers for more effective drugs and business models and value systems.
Affymetrix UK, Aridhia Informatics, IDBS, Life Technologies Corporation, Oxford Gene Technology and Source BioScience UK will lead the consortia carrying out the projects.
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 to demonstrate how molecular diagnosis of NHS patient’s tumours could be scaled up to provide a national service.
James Peach, director of Cancer Research UK’s stratified medicine programme, said: ‘Investing in tumour profiling will give us new ways to test tumours in the NHS, and the data capture work will allow us to develop better targeted cancer treatments in future.’
The partners in the Stratified Medicine Innovation Platform are the Technology Strategy Board, the Department of Health (England), the Scottish Government Health Directorates, the Medical Research Council (MRC), the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE), Cancer Research UK and Arthritis Research UK.