NEW YORK (GenomeWeb) – Cancer Research UK and the Medical Research Council this week launched a stratified medicine consortium aimed at advancing a personalized medicine approach for treating bowel cancer.
The S-CORT Consortium, short for Stratification in Colorectal cancer, is being launched with £5 million ($7.4 million) in funding, evenly divided between CRUK and MRC. It will use genomics-based technologies to investigate the biology of bowel cancer in samples from more than 2,000 patients from large clinical trials in an effort to predict how patients react to different treatments and to match patients with the most effective treatments.
CRUK said that more than 41,500 individuals in the UK are diagnosed with bowel cancer each year. S-CORT will identify and use new methods of predicting patients' responses to different treatments based on the genetic make-ups of their tumors and help their physicians treat them more effectively, CRUK said.
The consortium comprises 20 universities, commercial partners, and organizations, including the University of Oxford, Almac, AstraZeneca, GlaxoSmithKline, and the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute.
"We've a huge amount of new information coming through about the molecular changes that take place in bowel cancers, and we now need to understand how to match patients to the most effective treatments," Peter Johnson, CRUK's chief clinician, said in a statement. "This program will establish a blueprint for new studies looking to tailor treatment for patients with other cancer types."