Funded by The Little Princess Trust and administered by CCLG
Lead investigator: Dr Tanzina Chowdhury, Great Ormond Street Hospital
Award: £829,526.75
Awarded February 2024
Approximately one thousand children are diagnosed with Wilms tumour, a type of kidney cancer, per year in Europe. Surgery, chemotherapy, and sometimes radiotherapy can treat around 90% of those children.
However, improvements are needed. For example, we need to speed up diagnoses of children with all types of kidney cancer, diagnose children with more accuracy and we need to be able to predict the risk of relapse. Children also need new treatments that can reduce long-term side effects without affecting survival rates.
Dr Tanzina Chowdhury at Great Ormond Street Hospital is leading the new UMBRELLA PLUS study. She has two main priorities to improve outcomes for children with kidney cancer:
- Improving genetic testing:
This study aims to offer NHS whole genome sequencing to all children with kidney cancer. This is not currently accessible to all children with kidney tumours, and researchers don’t know enough about Wilms tumour genetics and how these results might affect diagnosis and treatment plans for each child.
Using information generated by the Little Princess Trust Wilms Tumour Knowledge Bank, led by Professor Sam Behjati, the researchers will look for genetic changes that improve the accuracy of diagnosis, reveal cancer predispositions, and highlight targets for treatment. This will provide a detailed understanding of which genetic errors matter for patients in a ‘personalised’ way. - Supporting more accurate diagnosis and monitoring.
This project will also assess the use of special blood tests, called ‘liquid biopsies’. These tests can detect the genetic material tumours shed into blood (circulating DNA), as shown in many other cancer types.
The researchers hope to show whether liquid biopsies could be used to improve the accuracy of diagnosis of different types of kidney cancer, and particularly to detect relapses earlier than scans or other methods. This would be particularly useful for children with Wilms tumours, where chemotherapy is usually given before surgery is used to remove the tumour and confirm the final diagnosis. A liquid biopsy would also potentially be able to monitor for relapse after the end of treatment, detecting it before any abnormal symptoms or scans are seen.
Dr Chowdhury and Prof Behjati hope this study will provide a model for delivering molecularly informed treatment to children with kidney cancer. It will set an example for how research data can be combined with clinical data to offer the best treatment for every child diagnosed with cancer.