Introducing our new clinical research funding

From my perspective, clinical trials are the pinnacle of cancer research, offering the chance to evaluate the amazing breakthroughs from discovery science in people and determine their efficacy in treating cancer.

As Head of clinical research, supported by my fantastic team, I’m lucky to be responsible for the funding and ongoing monitoring of a large portion of our portfolio of clinical research studies and supporting infrastructure.

We also get to develop and implement CRUK’s clinical research strategy to ensure that we maximise the benefit to patients.

Our broad portfolio includes nearly 100 active clinical trials, spanning from early to late phase, and covering common to rare cancers. These trials evaluate a range of innovative treatments, including novel drugs and drug combinations, radiotherapy and surgery. Over the years, our trials have led to significant advancements in cancer prevention, detection, and treatment, improving countless lives.

However, we are always sure to ask: Are we doing enough?

Our new statement of intent

Traditional clinical trial designs typically compare the effectiveness of new treatments against the current standard of care. While sometimes the new treatment proves superior, we often don’t fully understand the underlying mechanisms.

This lack of mechanistic insight means we can’t always determine why some patients respond better than others or why resistance and toxicity develop. Understanding these mechanisms is crucial for designing future trials and developing more effective, kinder treatments.

In 2022, Cancer Research UK launched an ambitious research strategy which aims to put discovery science at the heart of everything we do. For clinical research, this means asking additional mechanistic questions within our trials to advance our biological understanding of cancer, and its treatment. We not only want to know if a new treatment is effective, but also how and why the treatment is effective.

This knowledge will accelerate the virtuous cycle between discovery, translational and clinical research to drive the next generation of clinical trials and improve patient outcomes.

To address these challenges, in 2023 we led an extensive consultation with our research community. This helped us to identify the barriers to progress and the solutions needed which led to the development of our new clinical research statement of intent. This statement emphasises our commitment to addressing important clinical questions whilst also understanding how cancer develops, progresses, and responds to treatment, and translating this knowledge into better prevention, detection, and treatment methods.

Our new statement of intent highlights the need to bridge the gap between discovery science and clinical research in patients and the critical need to maintain a pipeline of outstanding clinician scientists to lead the next generation of clinical trials.

Clinical funding scheme overhaul

Our portfolio will focus on early-phase proof-of-concept trials with innovative methodologies that incorporate translational studies. We also aim to optimise treatments whilst minimising adverse effects for patients.

A key objective is to maximise the value of data and samples from our clinical research by making them available for high-quality experimental medicine research. Increasing diversity and opportunity in clinical research participation and the workforce are also key priorities.

During our consultation, it became clear that our existing funding schemes were part of the problem, hindering collaborative efforts between clinicians and discovery researchers and limiting the scope of the research. The restrictive criteria of the four separate schemes created a compartmentalised approach which has limited innovation and the integration of approaches needed to address important clinical and biological questions together within a study.

To address this, we have decided to overhaul our funding schemes completely. Our solution is a single, flexible, modular clinical research funding scheme, comprised of three interconnected modules: clinical trials, experimental medicine and sample collections.

We want to encourage bold and innovative ideas and the removal of many of the existing constraints will allow researchers to ask for what they need, to do the research that they want to do.

Valuable samples and whole-body physiology

We are committed to involving early-career researchers and providing scalable funding from small project-level awards to full program-level awards.

Our focus on translational research will give room for researchers to investigate whole-body physiology, enabling extensive studies of conditions like cachexia which drives many mortalities in cancer patients. Recognising the importance of big data, artificial intelligence, and machine learning, we will also support these approaches to clinical research within our experimental medicine module.

These studies would not be possible without patients contributing valuable samples, and we will maximise the value of these samples by prioritising hypothesis-driven sample collections.

Following the success of our TRACERx study, which has provided significant mechanistic insights into tumour biology, evolution, and patient interactions we will now encourage non-interventional studies which aim to enhance our understanding of biological mechanisms by observing patients over their treatment journey.

Through driving collaborations between discovery, translational and clinical researchers we aim to fund more high-quality research to address key clinical challenges whilst enhancing our understanding of biological mechanisms.

We recognise that this scheme may need to evolve over time, and we welcome feedback.

Good luck with your applications – and remember to be bold in your thinking and help us to beat cancer.