Cancer Grand Challenges

🚨The last few places are available for the Cancer Grand Challenges Conference: Cancer and the host Check out the programme which is now live and available to view online: cancergrandchallenges.org/conferences/ca… Register now to secure your place!!

New speaker announced 📣 We're delighted to welcome Adrian Hayday, an immunologist at @TheCrick, to our Cancer Grand Challenges Conference: Cancer and the host! Adrian's talk will explore how our understanding of T cells in cancer has evolved - and the regulation of physiology [or not] by T cells. Secure your place and join the conversation ➡️ cancergrandchallenges.org/conferences/ca…

Imagine the human body is a house and the brain is the alarm system. Usually, the nervous system can sense when something’s wrong -  like a door left open or a window breaking. Led by Leanne Li at @TheCrick, the InteroCANCEption team wants to know if the brain can also sense a tumour in the same way, by picking up small signals from inside the body through the nervous system If we can understand the body’s internal alarm system, we can drive meaningful advances in our understanding of neuroimmune interactions, with the ultimate aim of developing innovative therapies that target the nervous system and expand what is possible in cancer treatment. Learn more about InteroCANCEption 👉 youtube.com/watch?v=QvW3go… --- InteroCANCEption is funded by @CR_UK and @theNCI through Cancer Grand Challenges.

Professor Greg Hannon was the chair of the Cancer Grand Challenges Conference: Spatial Biology. Following the deeply sad news of the passing of Greg, we are sharing that the meeting will still go ahead in his memory. Greg was an extraordinary scientist, leader and collaborator. He was also a champion of Cancer Grand Challenges from its inception. His legacy and incredible impact on the field on spatial biology will be recognised in the programme.

Exciting new work from Professor Chris Garcia, co-investigator on MATCHMAKERS 👏 The study published in @NatureBiotech shows that deep peptide-recognition profiling, combined with machine learning, can decode T-cell receptor specificity, predict activating antigens, uncover new candidate targets, and even estimate confidence for novel receptors. Importantly, this work suggests T-cell receptors can be grouped by functional recognition patterns, not just sequence similarity - an important step towards MATCHMAKERS grand challenge of cracking the antigen-recognition code. Team MATCHMAKERS is funded through Cancer Grand Challenges by @CR_UK, @theNCI and @TheMarkFdn ⬇️ nature.com/articles/s4158…

What does advocacy-informed trial design look like? For patient advocate and Alice's Arc founder Sara Wakeling, whose daughter Alice lived with rhabdomyosarcoma for almost five years, team NexTGen’s clinical trial programme is deeply personal. Last month, team NexTGen launched a first of its kind trial, comprising three coordinated studies at leading centres in the UK and US, testing CAR-T cell therapies in children and young people with hard-to-treat solid tumours. The trial offers personalised investigational therapies that harness the immune system to target tumours. Find out how our teams are shaping trial design and accelerating breakthroughs in Discover with the help of #PatientVoices: features.cancergrandchallenges.org/hopeforchildre… NexTGen is funded by @CRUK, the @NCI and @TheMarkFdn

We’re pleased to announce that @LeanneLi_Crick, from @TheCrick, will be speaking at the Cancer Grand Challenges Conference: Cancer and the host at The @royalsociety in London next month. If you’re interested in hearing Leanne speak on the bidirectional interplay between the nervous system and cancer, joining other leading experts to discuss cancer as a systemic disease, view the full programme and secure your place 👇 cancergrandchallenges.org/conferences/ca…

#AACR shows what’s possible when global researchers unite to accelerate cancer progress. Our Head of Research, @LdelaRica, reflects on key scientific shifts and the strong presence of Cancer Grand Challenges teams at #AACR26. Read more: cancergrandchallenges.org/news/reflectio… @AACR

Introducing peptidiens! Congratulations to the TransCODE consortium on this exciting tour-de-force in @Nature: nature.com/articles/s4158… We look forward to seeing what’s next as lead authors Sebastiaan van Heesch (@prinsesmaximac and @oncodeinstitute) and John Prensner (@UMich) take on our dark proteome challenge as part of team ILLUMINE! Team ILLUMINE is funded by @CR_UK, @theNCI, and KiKa (Children Cancer Free Foundation) through Cancer Grand Challenges

Collaboration is key to tackling cancer’s biggest challenges, and a new paper from team OPTIMISTICC, published today in @CellCellPress, is a clear example of collaboration in practice by the Cancer Grand Challenges community. The study, made possible through joint working with team PROSPECT who are addressing the early-onset cancer challenge, shows that tumour-resident microbes are largely confined to cancers of the orodigestive tract, where biodiversity is greater than previously understood. Together, the teams have generated a powerful new resource and analytic pipeline, opening up fresh opportunities to understand how microbes interact with cancer. We spoke with Future Leader and first author @abdohlman, and Co-Team Lead, Matthew Meyerson (@DanaFarber, @harvardmed and the @broadinstitute) about the findings and the opportunities this pipeline and vast resource present for the future. 👉 Read more here: cancergrandchallenges.org/news/are-micro…

In this week's issue of @Nature, a great review from the Baker lab on the future of de novo protein design, and work from the @ThalesPapaG lab revealing the mechanisms by which the integrated stress response regulates immune evasion. nature.com/nature/volumes…

Congratulations to @CharlesSwanton, Mariam Jamal-Hanjani and colleagues on their fascinating analysis of the evolution of lung cancer metastasis published in @Nature! nature.com/articles/s4158…

Congratulations to the newly elected #NASmembers from our Cancer Grand Challenges community 👏 We’re proud to see this recognition by the @theNASciences for their distinguished and ongoing contributions to cancer research. A special congratulations to: 💫Doreen Cantrell (@LabDac) 💫Stephen Liberles (@SLiberles) 💫Chuan He 💫Mike Stratton nasonline.org/news/2026-nas-…

If you missed our Special Session at the #AACR Annual Meeting, you can still catch the key insights in the latest edition of Discover 👇 🔗features.cancergrandchallenges.org/impact/ Drawing on research from team Mutographs and team PROSPECT, we spoke with @balma85185 from @UCSF and #SirMikeStratton from @sangerinstitute. Take a closer look at the science as they explore how mutations work together to drive cancer, and how this research is reshaping our understanding of how cancer begins.