Six new collaborative research and development projects are set to receive nearly £5.8 million of UK government funding in the latest stage of a major five-year initiative to promote the development and roll-out of personalised medicine.
The latest projects to receive the funding, from the government-backed Technology Strategy Board (TSB), are in tumour profiling and data capture, with the aim of providing clinicians with information specific to a particular patient, which will enable more targeted treatment to be provided.
The investment is the third to be made through the TSB’s Stratified Medicine Innovation Platform, which will put £60 million of government funding over five years into R&D in the field. The first investments, totalling £3.7 million, were in the fields of inflammatory biomarkers for more effective drugs and to develop business models and value systems for stratified and personalised medicine.
The consortia carrying out the tumour profiling projects will be led by Affymetrix UK Ltd, Aridhia Informatics Ltd, IDBS, Life Technologies Corporation, Oxford Gene Technology and Source BioScience UK Ltd.
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 understanding of the power of targeted therapies.” This is turn could be applied to drug development.
Gray added that the projects are designed to lead to the development of products or services that can readily be adopted in the UK National Health Service.
The products and services generated by the projects will feed into a programme in stratified medicines set up by the charity, Cancer Research UK, which aims to test up to 9,000 tumour samples in a demonstration of how molecular diagnosis of tumours could be scaled up to provide a national service, whilst also consenting patients for permission to link their genetic and clinical data to inform future research.
The projects which have won funding are:
- Project Title: Developing a robust, reliable multiplex clinical tool for guiding tumour therapy
- Partners: Affymetrix UK Ltd (lead), ALMAC Diagnostics Ltd, Leeds Institute of Molecular Medicine
- Project Title: The Dundee Edinburgh Cancer Informatics Programme: Harnessing Excellent Research
- Partners: Aridhia Informatics Ltd (lead), University of Dundee, NHS Tayside, University of Edinburgh
- Project Title: Acropolis (Advanced Collaborative Research for Oncology Platform for Improved Outcomes, Learnings, Insight and Science)
- Partners: IDBS (lead), Quantix Ltd, Kings College London, Manchester University
- Project Title: Next Generation Sequencing Analysis: A Clinical Study to Implement an Innovative Cancer Care Model in the UK, with Health and Economic Benefits
- Partners: Life Technologies Corporation (lead), University of Oxford, AstraZeneca LLC, Johnson & Johnson
- Project Title: Development of a fully integrated service for sequencing-based tumour profiling including data interpretation and commercialisation of assay panel kit products.
- Partners: Oxford Gene Technology (lead), University of Southampton, University of Birmingham, CIS Healthcare
- Project Title: Tumour Mutation Profiling Using Illumina Massively Parallel Sequencing
- Partners: Source BioScience UK Ltd (lead), Barts Cancer Institute, Illumina Cambridge Ltd
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