Research team awarded £20m funding to tackle cancer’s biggest questions
Dr Stuart McDonald from our Centre for Tumour Biology has been announced by Cancer Research UK as a member of a global research team funded through its Grand Challenge competition- an international funding initiative that aims to answer some of the biggest questions facing cancer research.
Grand Challenge brings together the brightest scientists from around the world and from different disciplines to find solutions to cancer’s toughest challenges and save more lives. It is open to all scientists to bring innovative, international and collaborative approaches to research.
The Team
Dr McDonald is a co-investigator in the team STORMing Cancer, consisting of collaborators from the U.S., Canada, the UK and Israel, and led by Professor Thea Tlsty from the University of California, San Francisco. This pioneering team has been awarded £20 million to uncover how chronic inflammation promotes the development of cancer and identify novel ways to prevent cancer developing in high-risk patients with chronic inflammatory diseases.
Inflammation is the body’s first defence against infection and injury; however, chronic inflammation- where the immune system fails to limit itself and inflammation is inappropriately sustained- is involved in 20-25% of cancers globally. It is currently not fully understood how chronic inflammation drives cancer development. The team aims to discover the mechanism behind this process in a number of different cancers and use this information to develop novel therapies that target or adjust their microenvironment signals to return the tumour to a ‘normal’ or ‘benign’ state.
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