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  • Home > Blog > Research News > Cancer Research UK Teams Up With Pharmaceutical Companies to Bring Personalized Medicine One Step Closer to Mesothelioma Patients
Posted on Wednesday, Nov 30, 2011

Cancer Research UK Teams Up With Pharmaceutical Companies to Bring Personalized Medicine One Step Closer to Mesothelioma Patients

Cancer Research UK has announced a partnership with AstraZeneca and Pfizer that will move them one step closer to building a foundation to offer personalized medicine to cancer patients in the UK.  Personalized care is treatment targeted to the patients’ unique genetic characteristics, and offers the right treatment at the right time.  Mesothelioma is one type of cancer where patient-centric treatment optimizes the potential for success of the treatment.

Mesothelioma, a rare form of asbestos-related cancer, typically affecting the lining of the lungs, is highly aggressive and is resistant to many cancer treatments making it a difficult disease to treat effectively.  The prognosis for mesothelioma patients is usually grim: the average survival time varies from 4 – 18 months after diagnosis.

According to Professor Julian Peto, of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and the Institute of Cancer Research, the UK now has the highest death rate in the world from mesothelioma, with over 2,000 deaths a year.   The disease is currently not curable and typical treatments include surgery, chemotherapy and radiation. Mesothelioma causes an estimated 15,000 to 20,000 deaths per year worldwide.

Realizing that, as with mesothelioma, the most effective cancer treatments are based on the patient’s genetic make-up, Cancer Research UK has established the Stratified Medicine Programme with a goal to develop a national service to offer “standardized, high quality, cost-effective genetic testing of tumors.”   

Patient-centric treatment involves using genetic testing to identify one or more specific biomarkers that can allow a doctor to determine, for example, whether a person is responding to a medicine and whether another drug may be more effective.  Personalized medicine allows physicians to use indentifying characteristics of a patient’s tumor to drive treatment.

Just this year, Pfizer presented data from the preliminary results of a clinical trial for their oral anti-cancer drug crizotinib.  Used in the treatment of non-small cell lung cancer, the pill appears to double survival over standard drugs against tumors with the anaplastic lymphoma kinase (ALK) genetic marker.  There is a potential that the marker is also present in certain pleural mesothelioma cases making it a new treatment option for the disease.

Development of the Programme will be a multi-phased, multi-year project.   Implementation of the project will also include creation of a national database of “tumor genetic information, treatments and outcomes that will help researchers design more effective cancer treatments in the future.”