Funded by The Little Princess Trust and administered by CCLG
Lead investigator: Mr Max Pachl, University of Birmingham
Award: £186,617.65
Awarded February 2024
Wilms tumour is a very treatable type of kidney cancer, but it can grow back even after successful treatment. In half of those patients further treatment does not work. The key to getting rid of Wilms tumour and stopping it from coming back is a combination of chemotherapy, radiotherapy and surgical removal.
However, surgeons can’t see all the areas of disease, so they may leave cancer cells behind. They can take extra tissue to ensure all the cancer is removed, but this can come at a cost of significant problems for the patient which may continue long after the end of treatment.
Mr Max Pachl at the University of Birmingham aims to establish a new technique make Wilms tumour surgery easier, better, and safer.
He is working with a team of world experts to define a new fluorescent dye to use in Wilms tumour surgery. It will make tumour cells glow green during the operation so that surgeons can see active disease down to the cellular level. This means they can remove as much tumour as possible or mark areas for targeted radiotherapy. This may lead to lower relapse rates and treatment-related complications.
In this project, he will be working on mini tumours made up of 3D clumps of Wilms tumour cells, called organoids, grown in the lab. Mr Pachl’s team will test different dyes on these organoids, looking at which dye Wilms tumours take up, and how this happens at a cellular level.
The researchers will be using Indocyanine Green (ICG) and, for the first time, triazole NIR cyanine (TNC) dyes. Wilms tumour does not take up ICG because it doesn’t absorb well into cells, so it can currently only be used to show healthy cells. TNC is a new dye developed by Professor Vendrell at the University of Edinburgh which glows brighter than ICG and early tests show that it is taken up by some cancer cells.
This project aims to develop TNC into a Wilms tumour specific dye so that surgeons can see exactly where the cancer cells are during surgery. Mr Pachl hopes that this will improve the effectiveness of surgery as a kidney cancer treatment, and ultimately improve survival for these young patients.