A research team from Queen’s University Belfast is part of a new £5.5 million project which aims to transform bowel cancer care.
The CRC-STARS project will bring together more than 40 research experts from across the UK, Spain, Italy and Belgium to find better treatments for the disease which kills 16,800 people in the UK, including more than 460 in Northern Ireland, every year.
The team will work together to learn more about how bowel cancer behaves so that it can potentially be treated in a more personalised way in the future.
Personalised medicine involves using detailed information about a person’s cancer, not just the part of the body where the cancer started, to help with decisions about diagnosis and treatment.
The project is jointly funded by Cancer Research UK (£2 million), the Bowelbabe Fund for Cancer Research UK (£2 million), philanthropic support from Bjorn Saven CBE and Inger Saven (£1 million), and the Scientific Foundation of the Spanish Association Against Cancer (referred to by its Spanish language acronym, FCAECC) (£500,000).
The Queen’s team will be led by Dr Philip Dunne alongside co-investigators Dr Emma Kerr, Dr Raheleh Amirkhah and Dr Sudhir Malla from the Patrick G Johnston Centre for Cancer Research.
Their work will aim to better understand how different bowel cancers respond to current treatments, why certain bowel cancers spread, and whether they can predict which treatments will work for individual patients.
Dr Dunne said: “This research represents the culmination of many years’ work, with the substantial funding providing a unique opportunity for us to improve our understanding of colorectal cancer and how to use that new information to treat patients more effectively.”
Chief executive of Cancer Research UK, Michelle Mitchell, said: “For over 100 years, Cancer Research UK-funded scientists have been working to beat bowel cancer, and this project is one of the most comprehensive for bowel cancer that we have ever supported.
“Together with our funding partners – the Bowelbabe Fund, Bjorn and Inger Saven and the FCAECC – we can empower the CRC-STARS team to speed up the development of personalised treatment for people living with bowel cancer, bringing us closer to a world where people live longer, better lives, free from the fear of cancer.”
