Discovering what makes teenagers and young adults with soft tissue sarcomas different

Soft tissue sarcomas are a rare type of cancer that affects parts of the body such as fat, muscle and blood vessels. It is more common in teenagers and young adults, with around 100 patients diagnosed every year in the UK. Whilst there have been lots of improvements in survival for children with soft tissue sarcomas, the number of teenagers and young adult survivors has not increased as much.

Young people are normally given treatments that come from adult cancer care, or sometimes from childhood cancer care, which means that they are not tailored to these patients. There is a clear need to deliver better and more effective treatment strategies to improve survival rates for young people with soft tissue sarcoma. The development of new treatments for these patients has been slowed down, partly because researchers don’t know enough about these tumours. We need to learn more about teenagers and young adults with soft tissue sarcomas in order to find out what makes them different and how best to treat them.

In this project, Dr Paul Huang and his team at the Institute of Cancer Research will be discovering what the biological differences tumours have between teenage and young adult patients and from older adults. The team will then identify which new or existing treatments are specifically tailored for these patients. Dr Huang hopes that this will provide valuable new knowledge about soft tissue sarcomas in young people that will support the development of new treatments and help doctors predict which treatments would work best, based off the biology of their patient’s tumour.