Updates from the Sussex Cancer Research Centre on World Cancer Day.
The theme of World Cancer Day 2025 is “United by Unique”, which places people at the centre of care and their stories at the heart of the conversation. Today the Sussex Cancer Research Centre (SCRC) are announcing the outcomes of our inaugural funding awards, including PhD studentships, creative community engagement awards, and pump-priming awards. In keeping with the theme we’re also announcing a partnership with the Research Engagement Network and Diversity Resource International to develop a new approach to community engagement. Combining funding for innovative research projects, with novel and authentic approaches to community engagement, demonstrates that Sussex is at the forefront of cancer research, and uniquely placed to benefit people with lived experience of cancer.
Inaugural SCRC PhD Studentship
We’re excited to announce the award of the first Sussex Cancer Research Centre studentship to an exciting new collaboration between the Pearl Bioinformatics Laboratory, at the University of Sussex, the “Cancer of Unknown Primary” team at the University Hospitals Sussex NHS Foundation Trust, Brighton and Sussex Medical School, and the East Sussex Healthcare NHS Trust.
This interdisciplinary project aims to use the latest advances in artificial intelligence (AI) to find personalised treatment targets for people with cancer where the primary site of the disease is difficult to determine. The unique combination of advances in AI, the ability to rapidly sequence the genome of cancers, and a unique bench to bedside team assembled across Sussex has the potential to revolutionise the treatment of these cancers.
The project “AI solutions to guide treatment strategies for Cancers of Unknown Primaries (CUPs)” is led by Frances Pearl, Laurence Pearl, Max Whitley, and Eleni Ladikou, and was supported by both the University of Sussex and Brighton and Sussex Medical School.
Frances Pearl, University of Sussex leads the first SCRC PhD Studentship project.
Pump-priming awards
Thanks to the generous support of The Sussex Cancer Fund, The University of Brighton, Brighton and Sussex Medical School, and the University of Sussex, we have made five awards to kick-start exciting new collaborative research projects across Sussex. These diverse research projects span from bench to bedside and all share the potential to unlock new treatment approaches for multiple cancer types.
Explore our newly-funded projects
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Our brain constantly processes information coming from our senses. According to new scientific models, when impaired, these processes lead to feeling fatigued. While people with and beyond cancer are likely to experience fatigue, these models have yet to be tested in cancer patients. This project will investigate sensory information processing and fatigue in people with cancer and healthy participants. This project will also examine immune profiles to try and identify causes of fatigue.
This project establishes a new team consisting of an oncologist, psychiatrist and researchers from across Sussex. The team also have access to new facilities to enable research in partnership with people who live with and beyond cancer.
Cancer-related fatigue is recognized as a significant and distressing symptom and both causes and management strategies are key research priorities in the UK. This project will enable us to study its cause so patients and carers can understand the symptom better, allowing for the development of interventions to help all beat it.
Project Lead: Dr Jeanne Dekerle, Reader, School of Education, Sport and Health, University of Brighton
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Diffuse large B-cell lymphoma (DLBCL) is the most common type of blood cancer. While standard treatment works for about 60% of patients, 40% either do not respond or experience relapse, highlighting the need for better treatment options. One major reason for treatment failure is that some cancer cells can survive therapy (drug resistance). These surviving tumour cells are often supported by the “normal” cells surrounding the tumour, known as the tumour microenvironment (TME), which help the tumour survive and grow.
This project works toward bringing a new combination treatment to DLBCL patients. Through new methods that enable the investigation of interactions between cancer and TME, this project will test our promising new drug combination, paving the way for potential clinical trials.
Project Lead: Dr Fabio Simoes, Assistant Professor in Cancer Research at Brighton and Sussex Medical School
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People who undergo colorectal cancer surgery do better if they are physically active. This project is the first step in the development of an inclusive intervention, to help less active people, get active. We aim to collect information about activity to ‘co-produce’ a user-friendly activity intervention. This will be through partnering with patients, the public and health care professionals.
This project will engage people who’ve had colorectal cancer surgery to understand how we could improve outcomes with physical activity. It will focus particularly on technology (e.g. smartphones), to see if they could help. This project will also work with people who have had colorectal cancer surgery to determine what they think are important goals to achieve and what a good recovery looks like.
Colorectal cancer is the fourth most common cancer in the UK. For physical activity, the biggest benefit is moving people from being inactive to doing even light activities. Therefore, this project will focus on this group and aims to support patients to be best prepared for surgery. As a result, they would be more likely to recover well. This will benefit both individuals and the wider health service.
Project Lead: Dr Luke Hodgson, Intensive Care and Respiratory Consultant, Worthing Hospital
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The DNA in human cells is regularly damaged, even by the body's normal cellular processes. A DNA break in a chromosome can be caused by environmental exposure to radiation and chemicals but may also result from cell metabolism. Left unrepaired or incorrectly repaired, this may have the potential to cause and drive cancer. Fortunately, the body has sophisticated pathways to repair damaged DNA, but these are often altered in cancer to help tumours grow or resist chemotherapy and radiation treatment. Some cancers suppress the DNA repair system to allow cancer cells to divide with markedly damaged chromosomes. Ovarian cancers make use of a specific protein, which allows them to ignore DNA repair systems. Blocking or removing this protein from ovarian cancer cells makes them more susceptible to dying with chemotherapy and can reduce tumour growth. Despite its promise we do not understand, at an atomic level, what this protein looks like and how it works. Such information is critical for the discovery and development of intelligently designed drugs. We are aiming to find vulnerabilities in this protein that we can exploit for drug development. This could form the basis for a new class of chemotherapies to treat and cure the disease. Resistance to chemotherapy is a problem for ovarian cancers, therefore new therapies are much needed.
Project Lead: Dr Luke Yates, Assistant Professor in Genome Stability, Genome Damage and Stability Centre, University of Sussex
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Acute myeloid leukemia (AML) is an aggressive type of blood cancer that produces defective immature white blood cells which eventually lead to bone marrow failure. Adults and children can get AML, but typically this disease is diagnosed in older people. There is an urgent medical need for alternative targeted treatments with reduced side-effects.
Most AML cases present with overexpression of a cancer-promoting protein called beta-catenin yet there remains no approved drug that targets beta-catenin. Beta-catenin promotes leukemia by interacting with other proteins, so our lab investigated these partner proteins and discovered a new family of partner proteins.
This project will exploit the expertise of multiple institutes within the Sussex Cancer Research Centre to discover the overall level of these new protein partners in leukemia patient samples, their contribution to healthy blood and AML development, and how they regulate the signalling in AML cells. This initial information will allow us to design a new class of drugs that are safe and effective at reducing the levels of beta-catenin in blood cells. Future collaboration with medicinal chemists and structural biologists will work towards the creation of new class of drugs to halt AML progression, which could also be applicable to many other cancer types beyond.
Project Lead: Megan Wagstaff, Research Fellow, School of Life Sciences, University of Sussex
Creative community engagement awards
We are proud to announce the winners of our inaugural funding for creative projects designed to build new connections between people with lived experience of cancer in our communities and the cancer research happening within the SCRC.
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This project has two parts, one located at the Falmer campus, and one found across the SCRC campus. These artworks arose from Markus’s physical and psychological experiences during and after treatment for an incurable blood cancer.
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This project offers an innovative way to put people with lived experience at the heart our research.
Through creative workshops, people with lived experience of cancer will explore their own stories, using facilitated creative writing and collage. Co-production of artistic pieces containing words and collage will create the opportunitiy for the patient voice to be heard. By using the experience of the waiting room, where people often ruminate on their disease and consultation, this project will give unique insights into the lived experience of those served by our research.
New communty engagement partnerships
The founding of the Sussex Cancer Research Centre, with a mission of putting people with lived experience of cancer at the centre of our research, called for a new approach to community engagement. One that is inclusive of the diverse populations across Sussex and ensures equitable access for all of our communities. As such we didn’t want to dictate to the community how to engage with our research. In fact, the opposite. We wanted to know how all of our communities would most like to engage with their local cancer research. We worked with the Health and Care Research Partnership and Research Engagement Network, who secured NHS Enland Funding to enable co-design of a research engagement strategey for the SCRC.
We are proud that Sussex-based non-profilt Diversity Resource International (DRI) are leading this work. DRI are training community researchers, embedded in “underserved” communities across Sussex to co-design a research engagement strategy that is inclusive, vibrant, and sustainable.
Read more about our innovative new approach to community engagement here.
Left to right: Dr Patrick Nyikavaranda, Mebrak Ghebreweldi, and Dr Yaa Asare, of Diversity Resource International are leading the development of our community engagement strategy.