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Cancer Research UK and partners have committed £5.5 million in funding to form a world-leading research team, co-led by NDM’s Professor Simon Leedham. The team’s goal is to make personalised medicine a reality for people with bowel cancer.

Bowel cancer, also known as colorectal cancer, is the second most common cause of cancer deaths in the UK. Despite this, treatment options remain limited, particularly for patients who are diagnosed at later stages of the disease.

Dubbed 'CRC-STARS'*, this newly funded initiative will bring together over 40 research experts from across the UK, Spain, Italy and Belgium to find kinder, better treatments for the disease, which kills 16,800 people in the UK every year. Joining forces will enable them to use their combined expertise across multiple research areas, and pair clinical trial data with cutting-edge technology.

Michelle Mitchell, Chief Executive of Cancer Research UK, said: ‘For over 100 years, Cancer Research UK-funded scientists have been working to beat bowel cancer, and this project is one of the most comprehensive for bowel cancer that we have ever supported. Together with our funding partners – the Bowelbabe Fund, Bjorn and Inger Saven and the FCAECC – we can empower the CRC-STARS team to speed up the development of personalised treatment for people living with bowel cancer, bringing us closer to a world where people live longer, better lives, free from the fear of cancer.’

The CRC-STARS team will be co-led by NDM’s Professor Simon Leedham, Professor Owen Sansom from Cancer Research UK Scotland Institute and Professor Jenny Seligmann from the University of Leeds. The team of researchers will build on the tools, resources and discoveries developed by existing bowel cancer research collaborations (e.g. ACRCelerate) and Cancer Research UK’s National Biomarker Centre. They will also analyse data from Cancer Research UK-supported colorectal cancer studies such as the FOxTROTTREC and PRIME-RT clinical trials. 

The researchers aim to better understand how different bowel cancers respond to current treatments, why certain bowel cancers spread, and whether they can predict which treatments will work for individual patients.

Professor Leedham, Professor of Molecular Genetics at NDM, Honorary Consultant Gastroenterologist and CRC-STARS research co-lead, said: ‘Treating cancer with radiotherapy and drugs can cause some tumours to adaptively change in response to the therapy. We think this can be responsible for the development of treatment resistance and will use all the tools and expertise available to us across the CRC-STARS team to understand this, so we can find new and better ways to treat the disease.’

Personalised medicine involves using detailed information about a person’s cancer – not just the part of the body where the cancer started – to help with decisions about diagnosis and treatment.

While some patients are already benefitting from this type of treatment, such as people with certain types of breast cancer, it is an area still very much in development. The CRC-STARS team will work together to learn even more about how bowel cancer behaves so that it can potentially be treated in a more personalised way in the future.

CRC-STARS is jointly funded by Cancer Research UK (£2m), the Bowelbabe Fund for Cancer Research UK (£2m), philanthropic support from Bjorn Saven CBE and Inger Saven (£1m), and the Scientific Foundation of the Spanish Association Against Cancer (FCAECC, €600,000 [~£500,000]).

Read the full story on the CRUK website: https://news.cancerresearchuk.org/2025/03/31/5-5m-research-funding-to-transform-bowel-cancer-care/