Genuinely global, genuinely diverse
The first thing that strikes you walking into the Summit is the sheer range of people in the room. Scientists from disciplines you wouldn’t naturally associate with cancer research – astrophysicists, computational biologists, synthetic chemists – sitting alongside oncologists, venture investors and government funders from across Europe, North America, Asia and beyond. Investigators from 19 countries have been funded across Cancer Grand Challenges’ five funding rounds, and over 1,800 researchers are now part of the active portfolio. That number doesn’t fully capture what it means in practice. These are not loosely affiliated researchers publishing in parallel – they are genuinely interdisciplinary teams, built from scratch around problems that no single discipline could crack alone.
Moreover, with the scale the initiative now has we are seeing (and actively encouraging) cross-team collaboration – the sharing of know-how and technology platforms – and the acceleration coming from that.
What thinking differently can do
David Scott, Cancer Grand Challenges Director, and Charles Swanton Chair of the Cancer Grand Challenges Scientific Committee opened the Summit showcasing the shape of the initiative today: 21 teams, 18 challenges, £465 million committed, 465 papers published – 15% of them in the top 1% of cited work in their fields. The portfolio spans the full continuum of cancer biology across scales, from understanding the molecular mechanisms underlying tumour heterogeneity through to cachexia, all the way to population-level cancer inequities.
Some of the most interesting biology of the last decade has come out of these teams. Mutographs effectively created the field of mutational epidemiology – mapping the environmental and lifestyle signatures written into cancer genomes across populations worldwide. IMAXT and Rosetta led what Charles Swanton described as a spatial biology revolution, building tools to interrogate tumour architecture at the molecular and cellular level with a precision that simply didn’t exist before. PRECISION redefined understanding of DCIS – the pre-invasive breast lesion that has been overtreated for decades, with significant consequences for patients. These are not incremental advances. They have genuinely changed how people think.
CGC as a multiplier
One of the clearest illustrations of how Cancer Grand Challenges creates value beyond individual teams is SPACE – the Spatial Profiling and Annotation Centre of Excellence that grew out of IMAXT’s work. Looking at a SPACE poster at the Summit reception, I was struck by what it represents: a world-class spatial biology facility, enabled by a range of experts across disciplines, open to the entire Cancer Grand Challenges community and beyond.
SPACE can run imaging mass cytometry, multiplexed immunofluorescence, single-cell sequencing and 3D whole-organ imaging – often on the same tissue sample – at a scale that was inconceivable five years ago. The computational methods being used to find patterns across those multiplexed imaging datasets were adapted from astrophysics: cross-correlation power spectra, developed for mapping galaxy structures, repurposed to identify biologically significant regions in tumour tissue without the need for cell segmentation. An astronomer’s tool, reading cancer.
The platform is now available to everyone and another great example of how Cancer Grand Challenges democratises access to technology that would otherwise be limited to the resources of a single institution.
