The Belfast-Manchester Centre of Excellence is split across two cities, with a hospital-research lab partnership in each place.
This radical development in the fight against prostate cancer is in partnership with Prostate Cancer UK and the Movember Foundation with support from HSC R&D Division and will see an investment of £5 million over a five-year period across Belfast and Manchester.
The Belfast half of this Centre of Excellence is based at the Centre for Cancer Research and Cell Biology at Queen’s University Belfast, who specialise in stratified medicine (tailoring treatments to the patient groups who will respond best) and Biomarker discovery – identifying gene and protein signatures of risk and response to therapy.
In Manchester, clinicians at the Christie NHS Foundation Trust, a leading cancer treatment centre with a strong track record in radiotherapy research and treatment as well as in hosting early stage clinical trials, will work with scientists from the Cancer Research UK Manchester Institute and The University of Manchester.
Most of the research at the Belfast-Manchester Centre of Excellence will focus on recurrent prostate cancer. Around 2,000 men are diagnosed with recurrent prostate cancer after radiotherapy in the UK each year, and the Centre of Excellence will focus on identifying which men are more likely to be susceptible to recurrent disease in advance of their primary treatment. They’ll then aim to prevent recurrence by improving and refining radiotherapy treatments. By identifying men at high risk of recurrence, the scientists hope also to find those men at low risk, who may be spared more extreme therapy. The scientists at the Belfast-Manchester Centre of Excellence will also try to find which men with recurrent prostate cancer will respond best to the various chemotherapy treatments that are available.