A global, interdisciplinary team of researchers, including Nuffield Department of 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.
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.
Read the full story on the Nuffield Department of Population Health website.