Dr Paul Huang
Institute of Cancer Research
Awarded: £149,990
The challenge
Epithelioid sarcoma (EPS) is an ultra-rare sarcoma that impacts younger adults. These sarcomas are very challenging to treat with standard drugs used for sarcoma. Few targeted therapies for EPS are clinically approved and only a small subset of patients benefit from these drugs. This means that very sadly, outcomes are often poor for these patients.
In order to develop better drugs, it is important to understand the biology of why most EPS tumours don’t respond well to treatment. There is also no way to predict which patients are most likely to benefit from treatment (known as biomarkers). Undertaking detailed analyses of the biological features in EPS tumours will facilitate the discovery of new therapies and better biomarkers for future translation into the clinic.
How will this project tackle this challenge?
International collaboration is crucial to this project and the project will work with leading scientists at the German Cancer Research Center and the Gustave Roussy Institute in France. As a result, the team have a huge cohort of patient samples and laboratory models of epithelioid sarcoma. They will then conduct comprehensive analysis of these samples to build to build a ‘molecular atlas’ detailing the inner biological workings of EPS. During the project, they will:
- Conduct molecular analysis of tissue from patients and laboratory preclinical models to define biomarkers and candidate drug targets,
- Develop more accurate molecular diagnostic tools to reduce the current delay in the time to accurate diagnosis which can lead to patient anxiety and treatment delays and
- Understand the role of the immune system in EPS and if it can be exploited for immunotherapy
What this means for people affected by sarcoma
If successful, this project will result in new future treatments for EPS patients, generate a knowledge bank of biological data for use by the sarcoma research community to accelerate future research in EPS, and provide tools for doctors to tailor the most appropriate therapy for individual patients, ultimately improving patient care and outcomes.
We are grateful to Sarcoma UK for their support of this exciting research. We hope that this project will, in the longer term, result in new treatments for this ultra-rare cancer and provide tools for doctors to give patients the most appropriate therapy for them.
