The Francis Crick Institute and The Royal Marsden NHS Foundation Trust are leading a nationwide team of universities, hospitals and industry in research to help understand patient’s responses to immunotherapy and immunotherapy side effects in cancer.

The research is funded by £9m from the Medical Research Council and the Office for Life Sciences, and £12.9m in matched funds from industry partners, and will involve thousands of patients treated with immunotherapy from across the UK.

Immunotherapy drugs help the body’s immune system fight cancer, and are the first line treatment for kidney cancer that has spread. For some patients, immunotherapy can stop the progression of the disease. However, most patients do not benefit from immunotherapy, and many relapse or experience significant side effects.

The new UK-wide research programme, called MANIFEST (Multiomic Analysis of Immunotherapy Features Evidencing Success and Toxicity), has been set up to look at the barriers to the success of immunotherapy. The programme will look at biomarkers for immunotherapy. These biomarkers could help to select patients most likely to benefit from immunotherapy, but also reveal avenues for new treatments, like vaccines and cell therapies. MANIFEST aims to look for biomarkers which are present in patients before they start immunotherapy, and to develop tests that can monitor them during treatment.

The initial testing will include 3,000 patients who have already completed their treatment and then 3,000 who are starting treatment across the UK for breast, bladder, kidney and skin cancer, with plans to include additional cancer types as the programme expands. Data will be collected from these patients over four years, from blood tests, stool samples and tissue biopsies. The researchers will look at different aspects of the cancerous tumours, including their genetic makeup, where they are in relation to immune cells, and what chemical signals they are producing. They will also generate a profile of immune cells in each patient’s bloodstream and analyse their gut microbiome.

Prof Samra Turajlic, project lead, Clinical Group Leader at the Francis Crick Institute, Consultant Medical Oncologist at The Royal Marsden NHS Foundation Trust, and Trustee of Action Kidney Cancer said: “In the last ten years we have made huge progress in the treatment of cancer with immunotherapy, but we are still underserving many patients due to treatment failure and side effects. We have a unique opportunity in the UK, given the NHS, to address this challenge.

“We are hugely excited to work together with such a large group of clinicians, patients and our industry partners, each with unique experiences and expertise. Research on this scale can get us one step closer to better tests in the clinic, but also fuel more discoveries regarding cancer immunology and new therapies. Ultimately, we want to speed up the delivery of personalised medicine for a disease that affects huge numbers of people across the UK every year.”

Action Kidney Cancer are proud to be patient organisation partners in the MANIFEST consortium.

Read more on the Francis Crick Institute website here