A multi-disciplinary team of international scientists, led by the the University of Southampton, has been shortlisted to the final stages of Cancer Research UK’s global Grand Challenge – an ambitious series of £20m cancer grants tackling some of the toughest questions in cancer research.
Bringing together world-leading experts in immunogenetics, genetics, biochemists, blood and bone cancer specialists and scientists, UK-based researcher Dr Surinder Sahota and his MapT-MM team will search for a way to accurately predict whether patients with a pre-cancerous condition called monoclonal gammopathy of undetermined significance (MGUS) will go on to develop multiple myeloma, a blood cancer that localises to the bone marrow.
The team, which also includes the University of Oxford (UK), University of Heidelberg (Germany), Consorci Institut D’Investigacions Biomèdiques August Pi i Sunyer, Barcelona (Spain), Universitat Rovira i Virgili, Tarragona (Spain), and Yale School of Medicine (USA), will now receive seed-funding to draft their full research proposal and the winning proposal will be announced in autumn 2016. The Grand Challenge award aims to revolutionise how we diagnose, prevent and treat cancer by uniting teams of the best scientists around the world to come up with answers to crucial questions about how to save more lives from cancer. Dr Sahota, the lead for the MapT-MM team, said
“Our consortium is absolutely delighted at being shortlisted under the Cancer Research UK Grand Challenge Call as this now allows us to progress to a full application. Our team was particularly drawn to the Grand Challenge that tasked us to ‘Distinguish between lethal cancers that need treating and non-lethal cancers that don’t’. We will focus on how MGUS transforms to MM using a multitude of interlinked global experimental approaches. This strategy has only been made feasible by harnessing the available expertise worldwide. We have assembled a team of international investigators, each with a leading footprint in research in their fields, and have also included a patient advocate as an important and integral part of our team. We are looking forward with great interest to completing the full application to Cancer Research UK on our experimental strategy.”