£5.5m research funding to transform bowel cancer care

For over a century, our researchers have been finding new ways to prevent, detect and treat bowel cancer. And we’ve now launched our most ambitious bowel cancer project yet: the CRC-STARS* research initiative.  

Along with our partners, the Bowelbabe Fund for Cancer Research UK, philanthropic support from Bjorn Saven CBE and Inger Saven, and the Scientific Foundation of the Spanish Association Against Cancer (FCAECC), we have committed £5.5m in funding to form a world-leading research team tasked with making personalised medicine a reality for people with bowel cancer, also known as colorectal cancer. 

“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,” said Michelle Mitchell, our chief executive.  

“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.” 

Personalised medicine for bowel cancer

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.  

While some patients are already benefitting from this type of treatment, such as people with certain types of breast cancer, it is an area still very much in development for other types of cancer.  

The CRC-STARS team will work together to learn more about how bowel cancer behaves so that it can potentially be treated in a more personalised way. 

The researchers are hoping 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.  

“We’re delighted to be working with our colleagues across the UK and beyond in this new research partnership. Connecting early-stage discovery scientists working in laboratories with clinical researchers working in hospitals and other clinical settings will allow us to look at bowel cancer in a more sophisticated way than ever before. This will hopefully lead to better, more tailored treatments for this type of cancer and better patient outcomes,” said Professor Jenny Seligmann, Consultant Medical Oncologist, Professor of Gastrointestinal Oncology at the University of Leeds, and CRC-STARS research co-lead. 

Research on an international scale

Scientific research has always been a team effort, but in recent decades, those teams have become larger and more spread out across the globe. Advances in technology have made it easier for researchers to share their ideas and data to work together to solve the world’s problems, such as those we already support through our Cancer Grand Challenges funding awards.  

The CRC-STARS initiative will bring together 40 research experts from across the UK, Spain, Italy and Belgium to find kinder, better treatments for bowel cancer, which kills 16,800 people in the UK every year.  

Professor Owen Sansom (Cancer Research UK Scotland Institute), Professor Jenny Seligmann (University of Leeds) and Professor Simon Leedham (University of Oxford) are the research co-leads for the team. Joining forces will enable them to use their combined expertise across multiple research areas, and pair clinical trial data with cutting-edge technology. 

“Step by step, day by day, we’re discovering new ways to prevent, detect and treat bowel cancer and save lives. The support we’ve received from our funders will allow us to take bold steps towards better understanding bowel cancer and how to beat it,” said Professor Owen Sansom, Director of the Cancer Research UK Scotland Institute and CRC-STARS research co-lead. 

The FCAECC’s funding contribution will specifically support the work of the researchers based in Spain. The team of researchers will work on combining experimental, pre-clinical and clinical data to predict cancer progression and tailor new therapeutic approaches specific to each patient’s characteristics. 

“This project will not only help us to better understand the landscape of bowel cancer in a collaborative and multidisciplinary manner but will also allow us to place a strong emphasis on patient needs, accelerating the translation of results into clinical practice,” said Dr Marta Puyol, Scientific Director at the FCAECC. 

Building on existing research

CRC-STARS will build on the tools, resources and discoveries developed by existing bowel cancer research collaborations (such as ACRCelerate) and our National Biomarker Centre, who specialise in developing ways to detect and monitor cancer using tests. The team will also analyse data from colorectal cancer studies we’ve supported such as the FOxTROT, TREC and PRIME-RT clinical trials. 

“Treating cancer with radiotherapy and drugs can cause some tumours to adaptively change in response to the therapy. We think this can be responsible for the development of treatment resistance and will use all the tools and expertise available to us across the CRC-STARS team to understand this, so we can find new and better ways to treat the disease.” said Professor Simon Leedham, Professor of Molecular Genetics at University of Oxford, Honorary Consultant Gastroenterologist and CRC-STARS research co-lead. 

We look forward to sharing the new discoveries uncovered by the CRC-STARS team in the future. 

*CRC-STARS: Colorectal Cancer — Stratification of Therapies through Adaptive Responses.