NEW YORK – The International Alliance for Cancer Early Detection (ACED) recently received £50 million ($63 million) to continue its efforts to develop new approaches for detecting cancer earlier in patients.
According to Sarah Carden, ACED research program manager at Cancer Research UK, the alliance will focus on "large, programmatic research activity" going forward, emphasizing multiple research themes. One ACED project is focused on developing biomarkers for the early detection of ovarian cancer, with the goal of commercializing any resulting tests, Carden noted.
Other themes include intercepting cancer before it starts and treating it to halt disease progression. "This means we could treat high-risk patients before they develop tumors," Carden said.
ACED is also interested in utilizing the immune system’s cancer surveillance system to identify patients with early-stage cancer. Such research will identify the immune cells that monitor for early signs of cancer and use machine learning to study the markers these cells display when they detect early or pre-cancerous changes. "The goal is to see if these markers could be detected years before a cancer diagnosis," Carden noted.
She added that this program has seen progress during the first phase of ACED and that
researchers are now hoping to collaborate with industry partners on preventive vaccine initiatives targeting cancer-specific immune responses.
Another theme ACED is keen to address in coming years is understanding and addressing inequalities in cancer early detection, Carden noted.
ACED was launched by Cancer Research UK and several institutions in the UK and US five years ago with an initial budget of £55 million. The slight difference in five-year budgets is due to initial investments in infrastructure to support ACED in the UK, Carden said.
This first phase of the partnership, which kicked off in late 2019 and will run through this March, included teams at the University of Manchester, University College London, and the University of Cambridge in the UK, as well as the Knight Cancer Institute at Oregon Health & Science University and the Canary Center at Stanford University.
The new phase of the project, which will commence on April 1 and run through March 2030, will involve two new partners, the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston and the German Cancer Research Center (DKFZ) in Heidelberg.
Carden said that Dana-Farber and DKFZ are both "global leaders in early cancer detection, bringing unique expertise and resources to the alliance." She noted that Dana-Farber supports basic science, clinical trials, population health studies and community engagement. The institute is also the largest US National Cancer Institute-designated comprehensive cancer center, giving ACED greater access to the "expertise, research, and resources that come with that."
She described DKFZ's research as "spanning the entire translational continuum," and said that DKFZ has a special focus on cancer prevention, including experience with prevention research, education and training, and outreach and policy advice.
"This expertise is particularly relevant to ACED as we add interception of cancer as one of our core research themes," said Carden.
According to Carden, ACED is operated as a virtual institute, with strategic and operational management structures connecting its leadership with its community. Each member has its own director who together with CRUK's director of research leads the alliance. Each member, including ACED, also has program managers.
To support the development of its main themes, ACED holds workshops where ACED community members can "brainstorm and prioritize specific work packages" for each theme. During this next phase of the effort, all research proposals will be assessed by CRUK's Early Detection and Diagnosis Research Committee.
This will "ensure consistency across the early detection and diagnosis research portfolio and that the highest competitive standards are met," Carden said.
Ovarian Cancer Work
One project underway within ACED is focused on developing biomarkers for ovarian cancer. Carden said the research will identify the earliest genetic changes that occur in the fallopian tubes that lead to the development of the disease. In the UK, ovarian cancer is the sixth most common cancer, with about 7,500 new cases diagnosed per year, according to Cancer Research UK.
Armed with a new early stage detection test, doctors could identify high-risk patients and intervene before the disease can progress. "This is a vital area of unmet need for early detection of gynecological cancers," Carden said.
The name of the ACED program is Novel Early Markers for Ovarian Cancer (NEMO). Institutions participating in NEMO include University College London, the University of Manchester, Stanford, OHSU, and the University of Cambridge.
"The NEMO team hopes to be able to work with commercial partners to develop tests and minimally invasive sampling devices," said Carden.
She added that ACED is particularly interested in research translation and having a tangible patient impact. "As ACED becomes more established, we would like to see a large number of our funded research projects being taken forward for commercialization," said Carden.
In coming months and years, ACED researchers will start working closely with industrial partners to ensure such an impact, she said.