A range of clinical trials aimed at developing new treatments for pancreatic cancer will get underway after a £10 million investment from Cancer Research UK. The investment will support the PRECISION Panc project, which aims to develop personalised treatments for pancreatic cancer patients, improving the options and outcomes for a disease in which survival rates have remained stubbornly low.
Professor Andrew Biankin at the University of Glasgow, who has pioneered the project, along with researchers across the UK, aims to speed up recruitment and enrolment of pancreatic cancer patients to clinical trials that are right for the individual patient. The researchers will use the molecular profile of each individual cancer to offer patients and their clinicians a menu of trials that might benefit them.
The first wave of research will establish the best way to collect and profile patient tissue samples. Each patient will have up to five samples taken from their tumour at diagnosis for analysis at the University of Glasgow, and the results will guide clinical trial options in the future.
The three trials planned as part of this initiative will recruit a total of 658 patients from a number of centres across the UK – with the scope to add more trials in the future. Patients may also be helped on to suitable clinical trials that are already in progress.