From Birmingham to the world: funding life-changing research
Birmingham researchers are driving forward innovative medical studies with the potential to save lives. Donations are vital in making important research happen.
With donations from alumni and friends, our researchers can explore bold new ideas, gather essential evidence and take the crucial first steps towards developing new treatments and improving care for patients across the UK and beyond. This includes pioneering research into pancreatic cancer – one of the deadliest cancers in the world.
Vaccine offers new hope for pancreatic cancer patients
Sadly, pancreatic cancer is typically diagnosed at a late stage when curative surgery is no longer an option. For the 1 in 10 people who are eligible for surgery, the recurrence rate of pancreatic cancer after this treatment is over 80%.
Dr Shivan Sivakumar, Consultant Medical Oncologist and Associate Professor in Oncology, and his team are carrying out cutting-edge pancreatic cancer research, including running a pancreatic cancer vaccine trial.
The vaccine is developed using the same technology as the mRNA Covid vaccines. Following surgery, samples of a patient’s cancer cells are used to create a personalised vaccine for that individual. This encourages the immune system to produce antibodies, with the hope that this will train the immune system to attack the cancer cells – preventing the cancer from reoccurring. The Queen Elizabeth Hospital Birmingham is the first site in Europe to enrol a patient in this investigational pancreatic cancer vaccine trial.
If personalised mRNA vaccines are found to be successful at preventing pancreatic cancer recurrence, this could save the lives of thousands of patients diagnosed with pancreatic cancer every year around the world.
Supporting the next generation of researchers
Generous donations are also supporting PhD students like Lucy Goodman. Through a scholarship, Lucy has been given the opportunity to focus her research on cancer immunology, an area of deep personal interest to Lucy, cultivated throughout her higher education.
Lucy said: ‘This funding has given me the opportunity to do a PhD in cancer immunology, which has always been a passion of mine throughout higher education. Without it, it is extremely unlikely that I would have been able to pursue a research project in this particular area and would not have had the flexibility to incorporate many different scientific methods and work so closely with clinicians at the QE Hospital Birmingham, which is so important to ensure the 'bench to bedside' ethos of much of the research done here at Birmingham.
‘Cancer immunology is a rapidly developing field which has impacts on all of us. This area is a particularly exciting area to work in, both from a scientific perspective, but also from a more personal perspective - can my research, somewhere down the line, have real-world impacts and improve the quality of life of cancer patients.’
Novel approaches like the pancreatic cancer vaccine trial would be impossible to pursue without philanthropic funding in the early stages. Supporter funding from alumni and friends is crucial to funding more exciting research like this that saves lives.
From translational research to the development of new vaccines and cancer therapies, what we do at Birmingham plays a major part in the medical treatment of today’s global health challenges that affect us all. Birmingham researchers are driving life-changing advances and searching for the next medical breakthrough.
Find out how you can support crucial health research at Birmingham.