Even Grander Challenges
Introducing the new Chair of the Scientific Committee
Incoming Chair of the Cancer Grand Challenges Scientific Committee, Professor Charlie Swanton, gives his reflections on what exactly is a Grand Challenge and how the committees’ ambitions have grown with the initiative.
A grand challenge is hard to define, even for me, as Chair of the Cancer Grand Challenges Scientific Committee, but we know one when we see one. I like to think of it as what the challenge can achieve, or what the Cancer Grand Challenges approach can result in, that other funding streams could not.
Take, for example, team Mutographs, the teams’ findings showing that many carcinogens don’t actually induce DNA mutations totally changed our understanding of how cancer starts in the first place. That is a hugely important finding, because it completely opens up a whole new opportunity in the field of cancer prevention. The team has changed our fundamental view on cancer, and I think that's what we should be trying to achieve with a grand challenge.
Over my time on the committee, I’ve seen its ambition grow alongside the initiative, as we become even more confident that team science really can address the biggest questions in cancer research.
But what is the next frontier?
With the molecular biology revolution we’ve come a long way in understanding the signalling mechanisms that wire a cancer, and we have an early understanding of cell-cell interactions within the microenvironment. But in my opinion, what we need now is an understanding of cancer as a systemic disease, as fundamentally that is the problem that affects patients, and there's still an awful lot we simply don't know. We often forget that cancer is a systemic disease operating within and interfering with a complex network of communicating organs in a patient.
On the Cancer Grand Challenges Scientific Committee we have a critical mass of clinician and discovery scientists, who really understand the challenge of treating cancer and the complexities that still remain to be unravelled, and the role of discovery research to provide solutions, with a line of sight to the clinical problem. The involvement of the patient advocates, within the funded teams, and our committee, also keeps the patient front and centre.
Breaking down barriers
We now need to go beyond the tumour microenvironment, to understand how cancer interacts with the host and how the host interacts with the cancer. How does cancer affect the function of our diverse organs, from the liver to the heart to the brain and the immune system, and vice versa; how does ageing impact these processes and contribute to cancer risk, how do tumours hide from the immune system, in a niche remaining dormant for decades? To really get to grips with these questions requires multidisciplinary interactions. It requires the involvement of researchers that aren't generally used to working in the cancer domain, including both physiological and pathophysiological expertise from diverse disciplines. No single scientist, or lab could begin to address these kinds of questions. Through team science, Cancer Grand Challenges is breaking down these barriers.
As we embark on our next round of challenge consultation next month, bringing together some of the brightest minds, both clinicians and scientists, we need to ensure we are poising the right questions to the research community. And our Cancer Grand Challenges teams are changing the way we think about cancer, changing the questions we can ask. A good grand challenge should lead to more questions than answers and continually evolve over the funding period. By providing funding flexibility, Cancer Grand Challenges is trying to liberate the community from the traditional funding barriers, so that our teams can continually move to tackle the next question and follow the science towards addressing their challenge.
Not every grand challenge can be a resounding success, science doesn’t work like that. Some teams will have immediate impact, others may tell us which lines of enquiry not to follow, while some will impact our understanding over decades setting the foundations and allowing others to advance.
It’s a really exciting time in cancer research- we finally have the crucial combination of the right models, the right technologies, the right labs and critically the right kind of funding, enabling interdisciplinary multinational teams, to come together to tackle even more complex and perplexing questions.
Cancer Grand Challenges is a global initiative co-founded by the world's two largest funders of cancer research, Cancer Research UK and the National Cancer Institute in the US. Our work would not be possible without the collaboration of our growing network of diverse international partners who share our vision.
In March 2025 we’ll be announcing a new set of challenges and putting them to the research community.
