ERC awards QMUL €2m for cancer research
Researchers from Queen Mary, University of London, have been awarded a €2.43m grant from the European Research Council (ERC) to help revolutionise cancer cell research. The university will use the funding to develop bioengineering techniques to grow the first 3-dimensional human ‘tumour microenvironment’ in the laboratory.
The CANBUILD project will use a multi-disciplinary team of scientists and the latest advances in tissue engineering, biomechanics, imaging and stem cell biology to engineer a complex 3-dimensional human tumour. The researchers hope the different cell types of the tumour microenvironment will communicate, evolve and grow outside the body whilst being formed in the laboratory.
Professor Fran Balkwill, principal investigator on the CANBUILD project, said: “About half the cells in a tumour are not cancer cells, but ‘healthy’ cells such as immune cells and fibroblasts which the cancer is somehow corrupting to help it grow and spread. It seems logical that the best long-term treatments will come from combining both therapies that target the cancer cells with something aimed at the wider tumour microenvironment which, while not cancerous cells themselves, are supporting the cancer’s growth.”
The scientists hope the project will recreate the tumour microenvironment of human high-grade serious ovarian cancer, a subtype that leads to 70% of all ovarian cancer deaths. It is envisaged that the project’s results could also replace inadequate techniques where human cancer cells are grown in isolation on plastic surfaces whilst also providing better ways of testing new drugs that target the human tumour microenvironment.
