Laying the foundations for new precision treatments that could stop cancer spreading

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Stopping cancer from spreading is key to helping more people survive. 7 in 10 people who die of cancer do so because it has spread around their body. This spread is known as metastasis, and scientists don’t fully understand how it works.

Discovering how cancer spreads will unlock the next generation of treatments and technologies that can detect its earliest signs and even prevent it from happening.

We’re funding researchers who are using advanced mathematics to analyse a huge amount of clinical data from people with bowel cancer that has spread around their bodies.

They’re discovering how changes to the DNA of bowel cancer cells, and the healthy cells surrounding them, give cancer cells the ability to spread.

This work will produce the most comprehensive go-to dataset for bowel cancer researchers and could help scientists detect bowel cancer spread earlier and treat people affected by it more effectively.