A global, interdisciplinary team of researchers, including Oxford Population Health’s Professor Ruth Travis and Dr Karl Smith-Byrne, has been selected to receive a Cancer Grand Challenges award of $25m over five years to tackle the challenge of cancer avoidance.
The Antibody Tracking for Long-term Avoidance and Surveillance (ATLAS) team, led by Institute Imagine’s Paul Bastard, is one of five new teams that have been awarded funding from Cancer Grand Challenges – a global research initiative that identifies the toughest challenges in cancer research and empowers world-class, interdisciplinary research teams to come together and take them on.
This is a game-changing opportunity. By uniting diverse disciplines around the central question of how cancer can be avoided, we aim to unlock the immune system’s protective potential and lay the foundations for a new era in cancer prevention.- Ruth Travis, Professor of Epidemiology at Oxford Population Health
Cancer research has traditionally focused on identifying drivers of cancer rather than barriers to its development. Intriguingly, there are sub-sets of individuals with well-established cancer risks who, despite this predisposition, never develop cancer. This challenge seeks to uncover the biological mechanisms underpinning tumour resilience to understand what protects certain individuals from developing cancer.
Team ATLAS will investigate the role of immune-modulating autoantibodies (small molecules that impact our immune system’s ability to detect and fight the onset or progression of cancer) by utilising unique human cohorts, including centenarians, cancer-free individuals with high-risk exposures, and cancer-discordant twins. The research will build on some of the team’s pioneering work identifying the link between autoantibodies and COVID-19 disease severity.
Karl Smith-Byrne, Senior Molecular Epidemiologist at Oxford Population Health, said ‘Cancer Grand Challenges was created for questions like this, ones too large for any single lab and too urgent to leave unanswered. Why do some people live long lives without ever developing cancer? As an epidemiologist, I have spent more than a decade building the tools to answer that question. As a patient, I understand what that answer could mean.’
Ruth Travis, Professor of Epidemiology at Oxford Population Health, added ‘This is a game-changing opportunity. By uniting diverse disciplines around the central question of how cancer can be avoided, we aim to unlock the immune system’s protective potential and lay the foundations for a new era in cancer prevention.’
The ATLAS team unites clinicians, advocates and scientists with expertise in ageing, early detection, immunology, infectious disease-cancer interplay, large scale prospective epidemiology, multi-omics, paediatrics, prevention and more, across eight institutions in six countries. It is funded by Cancer Research UK and the Torrey Coast Foundation through Cancer Grand Challenges, and also includes members of Oxford University’s Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research.
Paul Bastard, ATLAS team lead said ‘Understanding cancer avoidance will bring us important insights into how some people remain cancer-free, which could guide us to the development of groundbreaking preventative and diagnostics strategies.’
‘Cancer Grand Challenges research and breakthroughs are made possible through our co-founders and visionary partners. Thanks to their incredible $125 million funding this year, we’re able to unite exceptional research teams from across the globe to tackle the most complex problems in cancer today,’ said Dr David Scott, Director of Cancer Grand Challenges. ‘Together, we’re creating opportunities for bold team science that could redefine what’s possible for people affected by cancer.’
The funded teams span nine countries, 36 institutions and unite more than 42 investigators and researchers. Read more on the Cancer Grand Challenges website.