Last week around 300 scientists, clinicians, funders, industry partners gathered for the annual Cancer Grand Challenges Summit. It was three days of science, debate and the kind of creative conversations that happen when you bring some of the world’s best researchers with such a breadth of expertise into the same room.

It has been a privilege to be part of this community for a while now. What was clear is how the initiative has matured over the past 10 years or so, and how we are seeing the incredible value of funding international team science at scale. The model doesn’t replace the need for single labs working away on challenging problems, but it adds something different – the ability to move quickly, with a range of expertise and a community helping along the way.

Genuinely global, genuinely diverse

The first thing that strikes you walking into the Summit is the sheer range of people in the room. Scientists from disciplines you wouldn’t naturally associate with cancer research – astrophysicists, computational biologists, synthetic chemists – sitting alongside oncologists, venture investors and government funders from across Europe, North America, Asia and beyond. Investigators from 19 countries have been funded across Cancer Grand Challenges’ five funding rounds, and over 1,800 researchers are now part of the active portfolio. That number doesn’t fully capture what it means in practice. These are not loosely affiliated researchers publishing in parallel – they are genuinely interdisciplinary teams, built from scratch around problems that no single discipline could crack alone.

Moreover, with the scale the initiative now has we are seeing (and actively encouraging) cross-team collaboration – the sharing of know-how and technology platforms – and the acceleration coming from that.

What thinking differently can do

David Scott, Cancer Grand Challenges Director, and Charles Swanton Chair of the Cancer Grand Challenges Scientific Committee opened the Summit showcasing the shape of the initiative today: 21 teams, 18 challenges, £465 million committed, 465 papers published – 15% of them in the top 1% of cited work in their fields. The portfolio spans the full continuum of cancer biology across scales, from understanding the molecular mechanisms underlying tumour heterogeneity through to cachexia, all the way to population-level cancer inequities.

Some of the most interesting biology of the last decade has come out of these teams. Mutographs effectively created the field of mutational epidemiology – mapping the environmental and lifestyle signatures written into cancer genomes across populations worldwide. IMAXT and Rosetta led what Charles Swanton described as a spatial biology revolution, building tools to interrogate tumour architecture at the molecular and cellular level with a precision that simply didn’t exist before. PRECISION redefined understanding of DCIS – the pre-invasive breast lesion that has been overtreated for decades, with significant consequences for patients. These are not incremental advances. They have genuinely changed how people think.

CGC as a multiplier

One of the clearest illustrations of how Cancer Grand Challenges creates value beyond individual teams is SPACE – the Spatial Profiling and Annotation Centre of Excellence that grew out of IMAXT’s work. Looking at a SPACE poster at the Summit reception, I was struck by what it represents: a world-class spatial biology facility, enabled by a range of experts across disciplines, open to the entire Cancer Grand Challenges community and beyond.

SPACE can run imaging mass cytometry, multiplexed immunofluorescence, single-cell sequencing and 3D whole-organ imaging – often on the same tissue sample – at a scale that was inconceivable five years ago. The computational methods being used to find patterns across those multiplexed imaging datasets were adapted from astrophysics: cross-correlation power spectra, developed for mapping galaxy structures, repurposed to identify biologically significant regions in tumour tissue without the need for cell segmentation. An astronomer’s tool, reading cancer.

The platform is now available to everyone and another great example of how Cancer Grand Challenges democratises access to technology that would otherwise be limited to the resources of a single institution.

Bench to business to bedside

The partnership meeting at this year’s Summit brought together around 20 organisations – national cancer funders from the Netherlands, France, Spain and Italy for example; philanthropic foundations from the US; venture-backed investors; and industry partners. What holds us all together is a shared conviction that progress against cancer requires a different model of collaboration.

Paul Mischel, who leads the eDyNAmiC team investigating extrachromosomal DNA (ecDNA) in cancer, articulated this really well. ecDNA – loops of DNA that exist outside chromosomes – had been observed in cancer cells for decades, but largely ignored. eDyNAmiC has transformed understanding of what ecDNA does: how it amplifies oncogenes, drives tumour heterogeneity, accelerates evolution and underpins resistance to treatment. What Cancer Grand Challenges gave Paul’s team was access to patient cohorts, spatial biology platforms and international scientific expertise that would have taken years to assemble independently. That acceleration is now translating into therapeutic programmes – novel drug targets, moving towards the clinic.

Alongside Paul, Venture capitalists brought a different perspective. CGC creates the conditions in which VC, philanthropy and science can come together in mutually beneficial ways. It provides the space where different players can have visibility and engage meaningfully: rigorous, ambitious science with translational intent, coordinated across institutions, with the kind of data density and team science that makes investment decisions tractable. Cancer Grand Challenges CGC reduces the friction in that journey, not by cutting corners, but by crowding in the right capabilities at the right moment.

Tough science and system failure for children with cancer

The most powerful session of the Summit, for me, was the panel on paediatric drug development – bringing together the Cancer Grand Challenges teams focused on childhood solid tumours.

Leona Knox, a patient advocate on the KOODAC team, told the room that her son was diagnosed with neuroblastoma fifteen years ago. He died two years later. He was five years old. She spoke about what parents actually want from clinical trials — not aimless hope, but empowered partnership.  She also spoke about the structural reality of a system in which drug development for children with cancer is predominantly driven by small charities set up by grieving parents, rather than by the systematic investment the problem deserves. Cancer Grand Challenges has changed that.

The scientific challenges are real. Childhood solid tumours are molecularly distinct from adult cancers. Patient numbers are small across the world. Models are imperfect. Gwenn Hansen from Nurix Therapeutics – a targeted protein degradation company, not primarily focused on paediatric oncology but part of team KOODAC– explained why her company is involved. The science aligns with their platform strategy; the molecular homogeneity of some childhood cancers (some rare fusion-driven tumours are essentially identical from patient to patient) actually makes them attractive targets for proving drug efficacy. Success breeds success. And if you can show a drug works in a molecularly defined paediatric cancer, you may have a shortcut to understanding its mechanism in the far larger adult population where the same driver appears.

Sanford Simon, a scientist on the KOODAC team and also a patient advocate – his daughter was diagnosed with fibrolamellar hepatocellular carcinoma – noted that for years he had been told by large pharmaceutical companies that they loved his work but the market was too small. What Cancer Grand Challenges has done is find a way to make the collaboration tractable: bringing together academics, clinical scientists, chemists, industry partners and patient advocates under a shared funded framework, with enough critical mass and shared purpose to make the investment worthwhile.

What Cancer Grand Challenges is, and what it is becoming

Almost ten years in, Cancer Grand Challenges is something more than a funding programme. It is an infrastructure for the kind of science that cannot be done any other way: science that is too complex, too interdisciplinary, and too long-term for conventional grants; science that requires teams assembled across borders, disciplines and sectors; science that needs to connect discovery with translation, and translation with the communities – patients, advocates, funders, industry – who will ultimately determine whether it reaches anyone.

The challenges it has set – from understanding mutational signatures to drugging the previously undruggable – are genuinely hard. Not every team will crack its challenge. But the portfolio is designed to accept that reality: the value of ambitious science is not solely in the successes, but in what the field learns from every attempt.

Cancer will not be solved by any one team, or any one approach, or any one country. It will be solved – to whatever extent it can be – by the kind of global, diverse, ambitious, collaborative effort that Cancer Grand Challenges is building. Ten years in, the architecture is there, the potential is real. The next decade is where it could be realised.