Cutting-edge research to personalise bowel cancer treatment
Everyone’s cancer is unique, so it shouldn’t be one-size-fits-all when it comes to treatment. And tumours can change over time, requiring different approaches as the disease progresses.
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To make treatment more personalised, we need to understand more about bowel cancer and find ways to accurately predict which treatments will work for each person.
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Professors Owen Sansom, Simon Leedham and Jenny Seligmann are leading CRC-STARS, a pioneering research programme that aims to revolutionise our understanding of bowel cancer, so we can treat it more effectively. The programme unites world-leading experts from the UK, Spain, Italy and Belgium to develop new and personalised treatments for the disease.
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The programme builds on recent discoveries made by scientists about the biology of bowel cancer cells in the lab. But individual cells in a lab don’t represent the complex ecosystem that tumours exist in. The CRC-STARS team are using cutting-edge lab techniques to grow and study model tumours that more accurately represent the environment of our bodies. This will help us understand how cancer cells change over time and in response to treatments.
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Alongside this, the team are analysing data, including blood and tumour samples, from three clinical trials that investigated different types and combinations of treatments. By looking at these samples retrospectively, the researchers can study the molecular differences between each person’s cancer. They can also compare the changes that are happening in someone’s cancer to their outcomes, for example whether the treatments worked, or whether their cancers came back or spread. This insight could help us better predict the best course of treatment for each person who develops bowel cancer based on the specific features of their disease.
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Through these parallel approaches, CRC-STARS aims to make personalised treatment a reality for people with bowel cancer, so more people can spend more time with the people they love.