Cancer Research UK and AstraZeneca to accelerate biomarker research

AstraZeneca is to double its investment in Cancer Research UK's biomarker research in an effort to understand better how drugs behave in early stage clinical trials.

The research will be led by Professor Caroline Dive from Cancer Research UK's Paterson Institute for Cancer Research at the University of Manchester.

The programme will enable the charity to undertake both biomarker discovery research and evaluate biomarkers in a range of AstraZeneca clinical trials through a commitment to process up to 30,000 biomarker assays a year over the next three years. This will rise from the current 14,000 a year.

The biomarkers studied will help to determine whether new AstraZeneca drugs kill tumour cells and/or prevent angiogenesis - the growth of new blood vessels to supply tumour cells with nutrients and oxygen.

Cancer Research Technology (CRT), the charity's development and commercialisation arm, facilitated the partnership after AstraZeneca completed a scoping exercise to decide where to base its collaborative biomarker research efforts.

Cancer Research UK and AstraZeneca will also create additional Clinical Pharmacology Fellowship awards and a new Radiation Fellowship post. These follow the success of the Cancer Research UK/AstraZeneca Clinical Pharmacology Programme to date, under which six Clinical Pharmacology Fellowships have been supported since it began in 2006.

The programme will help doctors conducting clinical trials to establish the right dose to give patients and to predict the effect the drug could have. It will also set the parameters of how to measure a drug's effectiveness.

Professor Dive presented new biomarker data at the NCRI Cancer Conference in Birmingham, UK, revealing that circulating tumour cells (CTCs) can be used to measure the effects of cancer drugs currently used to treat lung cancer. Her team measured the number of CTCs in blood samples taken from patients with lung cancer and showed that their frequency was higher among the patients whose cancer had spread. The number of CTCs dropped following chemotherapy treatment, suggesting that CTCs could be used as a biomarker in clinical trials of new drugs to help doctors treat patients with this type of cancer more effectively.

"This deal will enable us to advance our understanding of how biomarker research contributes to drug development and patient care while building on the know-how we have gained so far," said Professor Dive.

Dr Peter Sneddon, Cancer Research UK's executive director of clinical and translational research funding, added: "Biomarkers are fundamental to the development of more targeted medicines and Cancer Research UK has strongly supported this area of research, so we are delighted that AstraZeneca has chosen to invest in our programme in Manchester."