Astrazeneca is to double its investment in Cancer Research UK's biomarker research in an effort to better understand how drugs behave in early stage clinical trials.
The announcement coincides with a presentation at the NCRI Cancer Conference in Birmingham by Prof Caroline Dive from Cancer Research UK's Paterson Institute for Cancer Research at the University of Manchester, who will lead this biomarker research programme.
The programme will enable the charity to step-up its capacity 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 14,000 a year currently undertaken.
The biomarkers studied in this programme 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.
This partnership between Cancer Research UK, the Paterson Institute and Astrazeneca is based on the development of 'proof of concept' biomarkers.
It has been facilitated by Cancer Research Technology (CRT) - Cancer Research UK's development and commercialisation arm - after Astrazeneca completed a scoping exercise to decide where to base their collaborative biomarker research efforts.
Cancer Research UK and Astrazeneca will also boost their scientific expertise to make use of biomarker technologies by creating 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.
These scientists will support the research programme already underway and explore further the use of biomarkers in radiotherapy and/or chemotherapy clinical trials.
It is expected 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.
Dive will present new biomarker data at the NCRI Cancer Conference 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.
