Cancer Research UK–Children with Cancer UK Innovation Awards

We’re co-funding  five exciting new research projects

• Understanding why some children inherit a greater risk of developing cancer.
  Professor Richard Houlston at The Institute of Cancer Research, London, will lead a team to identify previously unknown inherited gene mutations that increase a child’s chances of getting cancer. This work could determine new ways to monitor children with these mutations, allowing doctors to diagnose cancer sooner and to better tailor each child’s treatment and care.
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• Understanding why chromosome duplication occurs in the cells of children with cancer, and if it can be used when designing new treatments.
  Professors Christine Harrison, Jonathan Higgins and Steve Clifford at Newcastle University will lead a team investigating a phenomenon where cancer cells of children and young people gain chromosomes, known as aneuploidy. This is found in many types of childhood cancers, and by understanding why this happens, they hope to find new ways to prevent and treat them.
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• Developing a new way to treat a type of acute lymphoblastic leukaemia (ALL) using the immune system.
  A form of ALL known as Mixed Lineage Leukaemia (MLL) gene rearranged infant ALL (MLLr-iALL) has poor survival. CAR T-cell therapy, which uses modified versions of a patient’s T cells to attack their cancer, is often used to treat leukaemia. But using this potentially life-saving treatment in very young patients is limited. This is because it’s very difficult to obtain T cells from them, as these patients have already gone through intensive chemotherapy and are often immunocompromised. Dr Anindita Roy at the University of Oxford, and Professor Anastasios Karadimitris of Imperial College London, plan to test a new way of treating the disease by adapting this therapy to use a different type of immune cell called invariant natural killer T (iNKT) cells that can be taken ‘off the shelf’. They hope this CAR-iNKT cell therapy will be a more effective way of treating these very young patients.
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• Improving outcomes for children and young people whose ALL relapses after treatment.
  Survival for children and young people with ALL is high, but the outlook is poor if treatment doesn’t work and the cancer comes back. Professor Marc Mansour, Dr David O’Connor, Dr Jack Bartram and Professor Owen Williams of University College London and Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children are investigating the causes behind ALL coming back, which has been historically difficult because relapse is rare. By establishing a nationwide study, the team hope to develop new ways of treating relapsed patients and predicting which patients are at higher risk of their cancer returning in the first place.
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• Identifying new targets to treat rhabdomyosarcoma (RMS), askeletal muscle cancer, by investigating its foetal origins.
  The biology of RMS is largely unexplored, but is thought to originate from cells in the foetus that develop incorrectly. Some of these cells persist in children with RMS when usually they wouldn’t. Dr Sam Behjati at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, and Dr Karin Straathof at University College London, want to understand why this happens by building a cell ‘atlas’ – a complete guide to the cells that form RMS. They hope that understanding how RMS develops will help bring to light new targets for treatment.
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