Funded by The Little Princess Trust and administered by CCLG
Lead investigator: Dr Alejandra Bruna, The Institute of Cancer Research
Award: £499,912.00
Awarded June 2021
Neuroblastoma is the most common solid tumour outside of the brain in children. While some types of neuroblastoma respond well to treatment, for children with ’high-risk’ neuroblastoma, survival is only around 50%.
Despite advances in cancer treatment overall, few successful treatments have been developed for neuroblastoma. Current treatments are very toxic, resulting in severe long-term side effects in survivors, and often fail to prevent disease progression or relapse.
One of neuroblastoma’s most prominent features is its clinical variability - ranging from spontaneous regression to incurable disease. Neuroblastoma is also highly diverse at the molecular level, meaning that the cells in a particular tumour are not the same throughout the tumour. This makes developing personalised and effective treatments difficult.
The effects of this variability within a single tumour on how treatments work are not fully understood and therefore not reflected in clinical decision making. This project proposes an ambitious approach to address the unmet clinical need, and aims to study the evolutionary process of tumours (for example how a tumour evolves to become resistant to treatment) in more detail than ever before, and in models that mirror the unique features of individual patients’ cancers.
Cutting-edge single-cell technology in special models of tumours, derived from real tumours, will study the impact of a patient’s cancers structure at the molecular level and how treatment affects this. We will also look at the molecular events that are activated during disease progression. Finally, we will use this knowledge to develop treatment strategies that make use of what we have learned to try and prevent resistance and relapse.