The latest teams bidding for up to £20 million to tackle cancer’s greatest challenges

If every cell in the body has the potential to become cancerous, what’s keeping most of them safe? And can AI help predict when and where things might start going wrong? 

These are just two of the questions the 12 research teams on the latest Cancer Grand Challenges shortlist are looking to answer. 

Selected from a record 227 applicants, the new teams are now working to develop their detailed proposals. In December, they’ll have the opportunity to make their cases for funding to the Cancer Grand Challenges Scientific Committee, a panel of world-leading scientists. 

The eventual winners, who will be announced in March 2026, will receive transformative grants of up to £20 million each to pursue their research into some of the most urgent and complex problems in cancer.

This is the fifth funding round for Cancer Grand Challenges, a global initiative we co-launched with the National Cancer Institute (NCI) in the US in 2020. To date, the initiative has awarded over £315 million to 16 multidisciplinary international research teams. 

The 12 teams on the latest shortlist are working across six different challenges, which include collaborating with artificial intelligence to advance research, understanding the mechanisms behind cancer resistance, and rewiring cancer cells to their disadvantage. 

Though not every team will be selected for funding, tackling any one of the challenges has the potential to transform our understanding of cancer and pave the way for breakthroughs in treatments. That’s why experts are stressing that bold, well-funded collaboration is vital to sustain progress. 

Harnessing the power of AI 

Cancer Grand Challenges was set up to support the type of collaborations we need to understand and overcome cancer’s complexities – and each team brings together different types of expertise and experience from around the world. 

Increasingly, cancer research teams are also beginning to rely on a different type of collaborator: artificial intelligence (AI), which can help researchers sort through each other’s work and uncover relevant insights from decades of historical data. 

And the two teams embarking on the AI-human collaboration challenge want to take the technology further. 

Team Biologia Ex Machina, led by Dr Marinka Zitnik at Harvard Medical School, are proposing to build an open-source AI “co-scientist” – a software system that can work with human researchers to generate theories about how and why cancers grow and resist treatment. It won’t just be one theory, either – these co-scientists will be able to rapidly produce and test thousands of ideas.  

The team’s efforts could significantly speed up the process of cancer research and even identify new treatment targets across different tumour types. 

Meanwhile, team SENTINEL, led by Professor Christina Curtis at Stanford University, plans to build a human-AI virtual laboratory to help understand how bowel cancer starts. Their virtual lab will use an AI-powered model of bowel cancer to identify the very first changes in healthy cells that might lead to cancer. The system will also be able to predict which cells are likely to become cancerous and, most importantly, explain why. 

Understanding cancer resistance  

Another two teams will be looking at the ways our bodies resist cancer, even when people have a very high cancer risk. Team Cancer Antibody Atlas, led by Dr Paul Bastard at Institute Imagine, plans to investigate whether this might have something to do with a malfunction in the immune system. They plan to work with diverse groups of people – including sets of twins and centenarians – to see what role autoantibodies play in cancer resistance. 

Most antibodies are proteins produced by the immune system to help them recognise threats. But sometimes they go wrong and start treating healthy parts of the body as sources of danger – a bit like confused factory guards who can’t tell the difference between workers and intruders. 

In previous work, members of the team found that autoantibodies made it harder for the immune system to fight intruders like the COVID-19 virus. But the same confusion could make some autoantibodies especially good at spotting cancer cells, which don’t break into the factory but are more like traitors hidden among the normal workers.

At the Wellcome Sanger Institute, Team FORTESSA, led by Dr Jyoti Nangalia, are planning to dive into a paradox at the centre of cancer biology. If every cell in a high-risk person’s body has the same potential to transform into a cancer cell, why do so few cells actually become cancerous? 

Answering that question means looking where cancer scientists normally don’t. Working with people from diverse populations and ages, the team will be carefully studying cells that haven’t become cancerous to uncover what protective mechanisms may already exist in the human body. 

“For the first time, we’re asking why cancer doesn’t develop when it should,” said Nangalia. “Put another way, most cancer research studies the one house that caught fire. We will study the thousands of houses that didn’t, to discover what keeps them safe. 

“We hope to uncover nature’s hidden protection that is probably hard at work every single day. This could open entirely new ways to prevent cancer before it starts.”

The next steps for Cancer Grand Challenges 

Those are just four of the 12 teams, covering two of the six challenges. Others are looking deep into so-called ‘dark’ proteins, exploring the strange ways our nervous system could be related to cancer development, and working to understand the culprits behind different types of DNA damage, which, ultimately, could be unidentified causes of cancer.

The teams selected for funding in March will have have an important role to play in shaping the future of cancer research and, more crucially, saving and improving the lives of people affected by the disease.