Prof Robin Jones
Royal Marsden Hospital
Awarded: £83,731
The challenge
Soft tissue sarcomas are a group of rare cancers that develop in the tissues that connect, support, or surround other structures or organs in the body. The standard treatment for soft tissue sarcomas that are diagnosed at an early stage is surgery.
However, approximately half of patients who undergo surgery will relapse. Patients who are more likely to relapse or those whose disease has already spread at the time of diagnosis are sometimes referred to as patients with ‘high-risk’ soft tissue sarcoma, and these patients are often faced with poorer outcomes.
How will this project tackle this challenge?
The Sarcoma Accelerator Consortium comprise a team of dedicated clinicians and researchers in the UK, Italy, and Spain, who are collaborating on an ambitious programme to develop personalised treatments that are needed to improve the poor survival rates of patients with high-risk soft tissue sarcomas.
This project will:
- Create a data hub for clinical, imaging and pathology data from a large number of patients with soft tissue sarcomas for the broader sarcoma research community to support further research
- Identify and analyse the activity of the genes and proteins that play a role in development and progression of aggressive forms of soft tissue sarcoma.
- Develop pre-clinical laboratory models of sarcoma to help discover new tailored treatments with the aim to develop of personalised medicines.
- Use data analytics and artificial intelligence approaches to generate user friendly tools that can help understand and predict how tumours will respond to treatment, and who is more likely to benefit from a therapy before surgery.
The project has already received funding from Cancer Research UK, Fondazione AIRC per la Ricerca sul Cancro, and Asociación Española Contra el Cáncer. Sarcoma UK is contributing an additional £83,731 to expand sites in the UK, increasing participation of UK patients in the study.
What this means for people affected by sarcoma
The programme as a whole aims to improve survival rates in patients with high-risk soft tissue sarcomas, providing more personalised treatment. Sarcoma UK’s funding will help researchers improve the datasets gained from the programme and make them more representative of the sarcoma patient population in the UK.
