Cancer Grand Challenges – taking on the toughest challenges at the frontiers of cancer science

Cancer Grand Challenges, a global initiative co-founded by Cancer Research UK and the National Cancer Institute in the US, has announced a major £100m commitment to propel cancer research into unchartered territory. Five pioneering international teams will each receive up to £20m over approximately five years to tackle some of the most ambitious and unanswered questions in cancer.

Bringing together a global coalition of the world’s leading scientists, funders and philanthropists, Cancer Grand Challenges enables bold, long-term collaboration to pursue disruptive ideas that could open entirely new routes for cancer prevention, detection and treatment. This latest investment matches the previous record £100m funding round and brings the total support for the initiative to £465m since 2016.
  
The five new teams will take on bold, ambitious challenges in cancer research – from harnessing natural immunity to cancer and triggering cancer cells to self-destruct, to revealing hidden proteins in cancer cells, uncovering unknown causes of DNA damage and exploring how manipulating the brain’s own signals might be used to fight tumours.

The 2026 funding has been awarded to these five teams:

The ATLAS Team will study remarkable groups of people who seem to avoid cancer – including cancer-free centenarians and individuals who would appear to be at a high risk due to factors such as heavy smoking, excessive alcohol consumption or genetic factors but never develop the disease. The team aims to uncover whether these groups carry distinctive autoantibodies – a type of antibody that targets the body’s own molecules and can sometimes help the immune system to spot early signs of tumours. By mapping these antibody patterns across individuals at high risk of cancer as well as patients with lung, pancreatic, colorectal, breast, oesophageal and liver cancers, and paediatric cancer patients with relapsing or refractory disease, the team hopes to develop new tools for cancer prevention, detection and treatment.

The InteroCANCEption Team will explore how interoception – the brain’s ability to sense and regulate the state of the body through the nervous system – may enable the brain to detect tumours and influence how they develop. By tracing nerve pathways and mapping brain activity, the team aims to identify which signals between the brain and tumours are associated with cancer progression. The team will also investigate across lung, pancreatic and colorectal tumours whether adapting signalling from the brain to tumours, for example, by drugs or neural implants, could be used as a treatment approach or to manage symptoms.

The REWIRE-CAN Team will challenge the traditional approach of treating cancer by blocking cancer growth and survival signals by instead hyperactivating them, and pushing cells into overdrive, forcing cells to become stressed and causing cell suicide. The team will also aim to reprogramme resistant tumours to become sensitive to treatment again. The team will explore its ideas in colorectal cancer where resistance to traditional treatments is a major problem, and where incidence of the disease in younger adults (known as early-onset colorectal cancer) is rising. Using patient samples across different stages of the disease – including early onset cases from younger patients and cutting-edge lab models like patient-derived organoids, they plan to rigorously test both the effectiveness and safety of these rewiring drugs with the ultimate hope of transforming outcomes for patients with colorectal cancer.

The ILLUMINE Team will explore the cancer ‘dark proteome’, an unusual set of proteins whose functions are largely unknown and whose role in cancer remains unclear. The team will investigate whether, and how, these proteins influence cancer development and progression, including in some of the hardest-to-treat cancers such as acute myeloid leukaemia, ovarian, lung, pancreatic and brain tumours. Some of these ‘dark proteins’ could act as flags, also known as antigens, that the immune system can recognise. The goal of the team is to develop innovative immunotherapies targeting these mysterious proteins to improve treatment options.

The CAUSE Team will develop new technologies to uncover what causes permanent alterations in DNA called mutations – the genetic alterations that underpin the development and progression of cancer. The team will search for tiny, transient chemical alterations on DNA caused by exposure to chemicals in the environment or normal processes inside the body, which can lead to mutations. By studying patterns of DNA changes in colorectal, kidney and liver cancers, the team aims to reveal hidden causes of cancer and create powerful tools to transform prevention.

Cancer Research UK has funded Cancer Grand Challenges for almost a decade. Teams are making incredible discoveries thanks to collaboration with a diverse range of international funding partners.
Cancer Grand Challenges Scientific Committee Chairman, Professor Charles Swanton, said: “Cancer is not a single disease, but a deeply complex and constantly evolving set of challenges - each with profound consequences for people and families worldwide. Making progress requires resilience, creativity and a boldness to confront questions that don’t yet have clear or easy answers.

“This year’s Cancer Grand Challenges push us further into unchartered territory than ever before, tackling profound questions: What makes some people resistant to cancer? And could we recruit the brain in the fight against cancer? Addressing challenges of this scale demands bold, interdisciplinary science and it is this approach that has the potential to fundamentally change how we understand and treat cancer.”

Director of Cancer Grand Challenges, Dr David Scott, said: “Achieving impact at this scale is only possible because of the commitment of our co-founders, Cancer Research UK and the National Cancer Institute, together with our coalition of visionary funding partners who share our mission to transform the landscape of cancer research. 

“Their support enables truly bold, high-risk science that wouldn’t be possible through traditional funding routes. By backing this new set of uniquely ambitious challenges, they are helping drive breakthroughs that could redefine how we think about, study, treat and prevent cancer.”

Cancer Research UK’s chief executive officer, Michelle Mitchell, said: “Cancer continues to have a profound impact on people, families and communities worldwide. We urgently need research with the ambition and focus to change that.

 “Cancer Grand Challenges brings together exceptional global teams and provides the long-term support and space to tackle the biggest obstacles that hold back progress. I’m excited to see what these teams will achieve, and how their work could help improve prevention, earlier diagnosis and more effective treatments.”

Launched in 2020, Cancer Grand Challenges takes a unique approach to collaboration, uniting the brightest minds from across the world and across disciplines to form global teams that pursue answers to some of the biggest questions facing cancer research and the treatment of people with cancer today.

Already, the initiative is reshaping how we think about, study, prevent and treat cancer. In less than a decade, past teams have transformed our understanding of how genetic mutations drive cancer, opened new therapeutic avenues and changed the way we think about tumour evolution and treatment resistance, developed cutting-edge tools to map tumours in three dimensions, revealed the complexity of the role of the microbiome in colorectal cancer, and uncovered clues as to why some early breast lesions develop into full cancers while others do not.

The Cancer Grand Challenges community has grown to more than 1,800 researchers and collaborators with 21 teams from across the world taking on 18 challenges. In this round the funded teams span 34 institutions in nine countries and will add a further 42 senior investigators to the Cancer Grand Challenges community.

Teams selected for Cancer Grand Challenges awards will use that support over the next five years to address the challenge, carry out research, publish peer-reviewed findings, share data widely and work toward advancing understanding or new approaches in their challenge area. 

To make this round possible, Cancer Research UK has received funding from the Bowelbabe Fund for Cancer Research UK, Cancer Research Institute, Children Cancer Free Foundation (KiKa), KWF Dutch Cancer Society, Torrey Coast Foundation and Yosemite (an oncology-focused venture firm), each of which are co-funding one of the new teams. Some teams are supported by more than one partner, reflecting the collaborative nature of this funding round.

For more information on teams, team members and their approach to tackling these challenges, visit cancergrandchallenges.org/.