Just over a year ago, we announced plans to do something completely new: the癌症研究英国大挑战赛。

It’s a£100 million scheme跨越未来五年，旨在应对最大的问题in cancer prevention, diagnosis and treatment. And it makes it all the more important to align the ‘hottest’ ideas with those that have the greatest potential impact.

显然，这引起了全球研究界的想象：自从我们开设了57个团队以来的五个月中，由25个不同国家的科学家组成，已经提出了最初的资金申请 - 提出了许多可能的方法来回答问题。

现在，我们的专家小组他们选择了其中的九个进入下一阶段。在接下来的几个月中，他们将磨练这些最初的想法，然后在最终决定谁将获得钱之前。

正如我们将在下面探索的那样，这9个团队已经产生了一些潜在的革命性新想法。

A vaccine to prevent cancer

我们的巨大挑战之一是develop a vaccine to prevent cancers developing- 一支团队提出了一种解决问题的潜在巧妙方法。生长的肿瘤渴望携带营养和氧气的滋养血液供应。团队建议开发一种可以切断该供应线的疫苗。

Professor Roy Bicknell, from the University of Birmingham, and his team of experts from five countries, has already identified molecules that encourage blood vessels to grow. And these are also found at high levels within certain tumors, where they may be among the first signals that cause tumor blood vessels to form.

The team is proposing to develop a vaccine that would alert the immune system if the body begins to make these molecules, and thus prevent cancer cells from calling out for a new blood supply. If they can work out how to target the right molecules in the right healthy people, the vaccine could cut off a tumor’s life support before it has the chance to start growing.

删除病毒

Vaccines also featured as part of the second shortlisted application, aiming to tackle our second Grand Challenge: toeradicate cancers caused by the Epstein-Barr Virus。

Professor Alan Rickinson, from the University of Birmingham, has drawn together some of the world’s leading experts in EBV research from eight different countries. And they are proposing a two-pronged attack on the virus, which导致约200,000例癌症每年世界各地。

Building on previous lab research, the first line of attack is to develop new treatments for cancers caused by the virus, and test these in clinical trials. The second, simultaneous, route of attack would involve studying in unprecedented detail how the virus affects molecules and processes inside infected cells.

他们希望汇集从这些研究中学到的所有信息，并将其与工作结合在一起，以确切了解免疫系统如何识别EBV感染，最终将导致一种疫苗，以防止该病毒引起的癌症，从而带来预防数百种的潜力成千上万的癌症死亡。

是什么导致癌症？

知道如何预防癌症在很大程度上依赖于联合国derstanding the processes that trigger it.

现在，研究人员知道，这些过程（无论是环境，基于生活方式还是遗传）在细胞的DNA中留下了明显的损害模式。到目前为止，研究人员已经指出了人类肿瘤中的30个“突变特征”，但只有一半与已知原因有关。

The third shortlisted team, led by Professor Mike Stratton from the UK’s Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, including experts from three countries, aims to solve our third Grand Challenge –preventing cancers by pinpointing their causes。

During the shortlisting, one of the members of our Grand Challenge scientific panel – Professor Tyler Jacks, director of the Koch Institute in the US – described this approach as “grand in that it approaches many different types of cancer”. And Stratton’s team hopes they will be able to link more of these signatures to the processes that cause them.

然后，他们计划将其应用于不同类型的癌症的发生率如何变化，在最感受到不同原因的影响的地方拼凑在一起。

这项研究的总体目标是找到监测健康人中这些签名的外观的方法，从而为预防疾病开辟新方法。

Better diagnosis

Finding a way for doctors to spot the difference between potentially lethal tumors that need treating, and those that won’t cause a patient any harm, isn’t easy. But这是我们第四挑战的目标。我们的小组入围了三支希望接受这一点的团队，他们的方法略有不同，每个团队都集中在不同类型的癌症上。

Led by the University of Oxford’s Professor Freddie Hamdy, and including researchers from three different countries, one team plans to focus onprostate cancer, throwing the latest DNA analysis and imaging technologies at thousands of tumor samples. They hope to find a unique ‘signature’ for both lethal and non-lethal tumors hidden in these data, which they then plan to test in a large clinical trial.

The next shortlisted team, led by the University of Southampton’s Dr Surinder Sahota, including experts from four different countries, is searching for a way to accurately predict whether patients with a pre-cancerous condition calledmonoclonal gammopathy of undetermined significance(MGUS) will go on to develop multiplemyeloma，从骨髓开始的癌症。

该团队建议搜寻MGU的人的DNA，以寻找骨髓瘤也发现的变化。

该团队建议搜寻MGU的人的DNA，以寻找骨髓瘤也发现的变化。Combining this with information about faulty molecules inside cells and how the immune system reacts to myeloma, the team hopes to be able to predict, as early as possible, who will develop cancer.

The third shortlisted application for this challenge came from an international team led by Netherlands Cancer Institute’s Dr Jelle Wesseling. And according to another of our panel members, Professor Sir David Lane, Scientific Director of the Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research, Chief Scientist at Singapore’s Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR), it gets at a “critical clinical question” – working out a way of predicting whether cells that have started to become cancerous in the breast – so called原位导管癌（DCIS）- 将继续成为侵入性的乳腺癌。

DCIS对医生构成了一个真正的问题。尚不能够预测哪些患者将继续发展需要治疗的危险乳腺癌，而哪些患者不会。

By studying large collections of data from clinical trials in the UK, Europe and US, Wesseling’s team aims to solve this crucial problem, giving doctors an urgently-needed way of telling the difference between these cancers.

Virtual reality

Three applications were shortlisted to solve our Challenge ofdeveloping a ‘Google Street View’ for cancer。Solving this, said panel member Professor Suzanne Cory, from the Molecular Genetics of Cancer Division at The Walter and Eliza Hall Institute in Australia, could “move us into a different future”.

And with virtual reality in the mix it’s easy to see why.

The first team, led by Cambridge’s Professor Greg Hannon, and including scientists from five different countries, plans to focus on乳腺癌。Combining technology that can track the movement and fate of cells in living tissue with molecular and genetic information, the team hopes to build a virtual reality experience that will allow researchers to ‘walk around’ inside 3D virtual tumors.

Breast cancers can be categorized into tendistinct ‘types’团队计划映射其中的每一个不同的疾病，以及有关每种类型患者如何表现的临床信息。这可能为科学家和医生查看肿瘤如何发展和对治疗的反应打开了一种全新的方式。

The second shortlisted application in this area is led by Professor Ehud Shapiro, and once again featured an exciting proposal involving virtual reality.

Shapiro的团队不满足于三个维度的映射肿瘤，由来自三个不同国家的科学家组成，计划增加第四个时间：时间。

Shapiro的团队不满足于三个维度的映射肿瘤，由来自三个不同国家的科学家组成，计划增加第四个时间：时间。

使用最新的技术,他们希望跟踪patients from diagnosis through treatment and even, in some cases, after death. In their application the team said that trying to look at the huge volumes of data that might result wouldn’t be “directly comprehensible”. So they’ll need to develop cutting edge new software to turn this complex data into a new, virtual reality.

最终，他们希望产生最全面的肿瘤视野，从最早的起源到开始散布何时及其范围。他们想为每个患者做这件事，希望找到将来对待人的最佳方法。

The third team, led by Dr Josephine Bunch, propose combining three cutting-edge areas of research – machinery called mass spectrometry that can measure all the molecules inside individual cancer cells; the latest imaging technology; and next-generation genetic analysis – to generate detailed ‘molecular maps’ of tumors.

Combining the team’s expertise from several different scientific disciplines, they hope these maps will offer ways to group patients to help test personalized treatments, as well as finding new ways to accurately diagnose and monitor tumors.

What happens next?

现在，我们将支持每个团队进一步发展他们的方法，并提交完整的申请。然后，我们的专家小组将在今年晚些时候再次开会，以决定这笔钱的去向。

On the subject of where this decision may end up, Professor Nic Jones, director of the Manchester Cancer Research Centre and member of our Grand Challenge scientific panel was quite clear during the shortlisting: “There’s no point doing exciting science if it’s not going to be transformational.”

And it would seem that, among these proposals, there are the teams and the ideas that have the potential to do both.