Birmingham researchers to collaborate with experts from across the world to develop more effective treatments.
Researchers from the University of Birmingham will be part of a new global team of bowel cancer research experts in the new CRC-STARS initiative, aiming to solve unanswered questions about the disease by bringing together research expertise from across the world. It is hoped that this will help find kinder and more effective treatments for bowel cancer patients.
Announced today, Cancer Research UK (CRUK) and partners will provide £5.5m of funding to build the ground-breaking research team. Birmingham experts will work alongside researchers from across the UK, Spain, Italy and Belgium to make personalised medicine a reality for people with bowel cancer.
Also known as colorectal cancer, bowel cancer is the second most common cause of cancer deaths in the UK, killing 16,800 people every year. However, treatment options are limited for patients, particularly those with a late diagnosis.
CRC-STARS is jointly funded by CRUK (£2m), the Bowelbabe Fund for Cancer Research UK (£2m), philanthropic support from Bjorn Saven CBE and Inger Saven (£1m), and the Scientific Foundation of the Spanish Association Against Cancer (FCAECC, €600,000 [~£500,000]).
The Bowelbabe Fund for CRUK was set up to continue the inspiring legacy of Dame Deborah James who was diagnosed with bowel cancer in 2016 at the age of 35.
CRC-STARS represents a really important study that brings together all of the UK experts in bowel cancer to transform our understanding of the disease. This will allow us to improve treatment for young onset bowel cancer, such as that experienced by Deborah James, especially important due to the worrying rise we are seeing in bowel cancer in young people across the world.
As well as building on existing bowel cancer research collaborations and CRUK’s National Biomarker Centre, researchers will analyse data from CRUK supported bowel cancer studies, including the Birmingham-led FOxTROT and STAR-TREC trials.
The FOxTROT trial found that giving colon cancer patients chemotherapy before rather than after surgery reduced the chance of cancer returning within 2 years by 28%. Doctors can now put these finding into clinical practice, to save lives of patients. The STAR-TREC trial is an international, multi-centre, randomised study. The trial is likely to revolutionise the treatment of patients with localised forms of rectal cancer who would normally have major surgery to remove the rectum and a stoma bag. Instead, patients have outpatient radiotherapy treatment to shrink and ablate their cancer, without the need for surgery.
We look forward to working with CRC-STARS to further improve treatment of rectal cancer and help more patients benefit from the non-operative approach we developed in STAR-TREC.
Up to 50% of potentially curable colon cancer does not respond to current chemotherapy. CRC-STARS provides the opportunity to interrogate unique sample sets, such as FOxTROT, to predict which tumours will and will not respond to current therapy. These findings can be implemented directly into the FOxTROT Platform studies and will rapidly transform treatment across the world within the next 5 years.
The CRC-STARS team will be co-led by Cancer Research UK Scotland, the University of Leeds and the University of Oxford. The collaborative nature of the initiative will help researchers understand the disease in a multidisciplinary manner and develop more personalised treatments for patients.
Professor of Cancer Genetics & Surgery
Staff profile for Andrew Beggs, Professor of Cancer Genetics & Surgery, Department of Cancer and Genomic Sciences, College of Medicine and Health, University of Birmingham.
Professor of Colorectal Surgery / Head of Section - Surgery
Staff profile for Mr Simon Bach, Clinical Lead D3B Early Phase Trials Unit, CRUK Clinical Trials Unit and Consultant Colorectal Surgeon, Queen Elizabeth Hospital Birmingham, Department of Cancer and Genomic Sciences
Barling Professor of Surgery
Profile of Professor Dion Morton, Professor of Surgery, Department of Applied Health Sciences, University of Birmingham
