Detecting the (almost) undetectable: new cancer alliance

UCL research teams are part of a new transatlantic research alliance to develop radical new strategies and technologies to detect cancer at its earliest stage. Cancer Research UK is the lead funder of the International Alliance for Cancer Early Detection (ACED), a £55m investment bringing together UCL, Canary Center at Stanford University, the University of Cambridge, the OHSU Knight Cancer Institute, and the University of Manchester. Early detection is essential to help more people beat cancer - a patient's chance of surviving their disease improves dramatically when cancer is found and treated earlier. Understanding the biology of early cancers and pre-cancerous states will allow doctors to find accurate ways to spot the disease earlier and where necessary treat it effectively. It could even enable 'precision prevention' - where the disease could be stopped from ever occurring in the first place. Five-year survival for six different types of cancer is more than three times higher if the disease is diagnosed at stage one, when the tumour tends to be small and remains localised, compared with survival when diagnosed at stage four, when the cancer tends to be larger and has started to invade surrounding tissue and other organs. The UCL ACED centre is led by Professor Mark Emberton (Dean, UCL Faculty of Medical Sciences) and hosts 24 co-investigators across UCL and partner NHS trusts, with access to over 200,000 patients for clinical trials.