Lung cancer is the leading cause of cancer-related death, accounting for nearly 1.4 million deaths worldwide every year. Approximately 78% of cases are NSCLC, for which the overall 5-year survival remains 67% for stage IB, 49% for stage II and 39% for stage III. Although advances have been made for maintenance therapy, the efficacy of standard platinum-based chemotherapeutic treatment of NSCLC has reached a plateau, particularly in the adjuvant setting, so a more radical approach is needed to develop novel therapeutic modalities. There is increasing evidence to indicate that intratumour heterogeneity is a major hurdle to improving therapeutic outcomes.
THE TEAM
Chief Investigator
Prof Charles Swanton – Consultant Medical Oncologist, Senior Cancer Research UK Clinical Research Fellow, UCL Cancer Institute (CI), Francis Crick Institute (FCI).
https://www.crick.ac.uk/research/a-z-researchers/researchers-p-s/charles-swanton/
Chief Scientific Investigators
Prof Caroline Dive – Head of the Clinical and Experimental Pharmacology Group of the CRUK Manchester Institute (Manchester)
Prof Jacqui Shaw – Group Leader and Professor of Translational Cancer Genetics (Leicester)
Dr Sergio Quezada – Group Leader, UCL CI (UCL)
Principal Investigators
Dr Yvonne Summers – Consultant Medical Oncologist (Manchester)
Dr Fiona Blackhall – Clinical Senior Lecturer and Honorary Consultant Medical Oncologist (Manchester)
Prof Dean Fennell – Consultant Medical Oncologist, Chair of Thoracic Medical Oncology (Leicester)
Dr Marianne Nicolson – Consultant Medical Oncologist (Aberdeen)
Prof Babu Naidu – Consultant Cardiothoracic Surgeon (Birmingham)
Dr Jason Lester – Consultant Medical Oncologist (Cardiff)
Dr David Chao – Consultant Medical Oncologist (North Middlesex)
Dr Girija Anand – Consultant Medical Oncologist (Barnet)
Dr Sara Lock – Consultant Respiratory Physician (Whittington)
Dr Peter Russell – Consultant Respiratory Physician (Princess Alexandra)
Dr Veni Ezhil – Consultant Clinical Oncologist (Ashford and St Peters)
Mr Eric Lim – Consultant Thoracic Surgeon, Senior lecturer in Thoracic Surgery and Reader (Royal Brompton)
Prof Christian Ottensmeier – Consultant Medical Oncologist and Professor of Experimental Medicine (Southampton)
Dr Sarah Danson – Senior Lecturer in Medical Oncology and Honorary Consultant in Medical Oncology (Sheffield)
Prof Peter Schmid – Professor of Experimental Cancer Medicine and Honorary Consultant in Medical Oncology (Barts)
Collaborators
Dr John Le Quesne – Consultant Thoracic Pathologist, Senior Lecturer University of Leicester (Leicester)
Dr Mark Lowdell – Director of Cellular Therapeutics (Royal Free Hospital/UCL Cancer Biobank)
Professor Sam Janes – Professor of Respiratory Medicine (UCLH)
Dr Philippe Taniere- Consultant Histopathologist (Birmingham)
Dr Hugo Aerts- Assistant Professor of Radiation Oncology, Harvard Medical School
Andre Altman- MRC Senior Fellow, Translational Imaging Group, UCL
Dr Sheila Singh- Associate Professor of Surgery and Biochemistry, Paediatric Neurosurgeon at McMaster Children’s Hospital.
Natera Inc – Genetic testing and Diagnostics Company, San Carlos, California.
RELEVANT PUBLICATIONS
Jamal-Hanjani M et al. Tracking genomic cancer evolution for precision medicine: the lung TRACERx study. PLoS Biol. 2014 Jul 8;12(7):e1001906. PubMed PMID: 25003521
Jamal-Hanjani M, Wilson GA, Horswell S, Mitter R, Sakarya O, Constantin T, Salari R, Kirkizlar E, Sigurjonsson S, Pelham R, Kareht S, Zimmermann B, Swanton C. Ann Oncol. Detetion of ubiquitous and heterogeneous mutations in cell-free DNA from patients with early-stage non-small-cell lung cancer 2016 May;27(5):862-7. doi: 10.1093/annonc/mdw037. Epub 2016 Jan 28.
de Bruin, Elza C., et al. “Spatial and temporal diversity in genomic instability processes defines lung cancer evolution.” Science 346.6206 (2014): 251-256.
McGranahan, Nicholas, et al. “Clonal status of actionable driver events and the timing of mutational processes in cancer evolution.” Science translational medicine 7.283 (2015): 283ra54-283ra54.
McGranahan, Nicholas, et al. “Clonal neoantigens elicit T cell immunoreactivity and sensitivity to immune checkpoint blockade.” Science 351.6280 (2016): 1463-1469.
FUNDERS
Cancer Research UK
Rosetrees Trust
Academy for Medical Sciences
UCL Biomedical Research Centre