The CRC-STARS project will bring together over 40 research experts from across the UK, Spain, Italy and Belgium to find kinder, better treatments for the disease, which kills 16,800 people in the UK, including over 460 in Northern Ireland, every year.

The CRC-STARS team will work together to learn even more about how bowel cancer behaves so that it can potentially be treated in a more personalised way in the future.

Personalised medicine involves using detailed information about a person’s cancer - not just the part of the body where the cancer started - to help with decisions about diagnosis and treatment.

CRC-STARS is jointly funded by Cancer Research UK (£2m), the Bowelbabe Fund for Cancer Research UK (£2m), philanthropic support from Bjorn Saven CBE and Inger Saven (£1m), and the Scientific Foundation of the Spanish Association Against Cancer (FCAECC, €600,000 [~£500,000]).

The CRC-STARS Queen’s team will be led by Dr Philip Dunne alongside co-investigators Dr Emma Kerr, Dr Raheleh Amirkhah and Dr Sudhir Malla from PGJCCR.

“The CRC-STARS project is a big team effort that brings together cancer researchers from the UK and Europe,” explained Dr Malla. “The goal is to work together to better understand why bowel cancer patients respond differently to treatments.”

Their work will aim to better understand how different bowel cancers respond to current treatments, why certain bowel cancers spread, and whether they can predict which treatments will work for individual patients.

Dr Amirkhah illustrated how her role as a cancer bioinformatician is to “analyse bowel tissue data across all stages of tumour development (normal to precancer to established tumour) to understand how, why, and when tumours form and spread. By combining patient data with preclinical models, we aim to improve predictions of which treatments will work best for each person.”

Dr Malla explained how his research: “focuses on studying how cancer cells interact with healthy cells and how the structure and layout of a tumour affect its behaviour and response to treatment. My role as computational biologist will involve in data analysis, presenting and sharing any new findings or ideas that emerges with other members, and ensuring that the information benefits the entire team in advancing our shared interest in bowel cancer research.”

Commenting on today’s announcement, Dr Philip Dunne, CRC-STARS research lead from the Patrick G Johnston Centre for Cancer Research at Queen’s University said: “This research represents the culmination of many years work, with the substantial funding providing a unique opportunity for us to improve our understanding of colorectal cancer and how to use that new information to treat patients more effectively.”

Chief Executive of Cancer Research UK, Michelle Mitchell, said: “For over 100 years, Cancer Research UK-funded scientists have been working to beat bowel cancer, and this project is one of the most comprehensive for bowel cancer that we have ever supported.

“Together with our funding partners – the Bowelbabe Fund, Bjorn and Inger Saven and the FCAECC – we can empower the CRC-STARS team to speed up the development of personalised treatment for people living with bowel cancer, bringing us closer to a world where people live longer, better lives, free from the fear of cancer.”