March 2018

A recently formed Manchester health consortium, led by The Christie, has been awarded nearly £7 million of funding to ensure more patients benefit from a new generation of disease-fighting drugs for cancer and non-cancer illnesses.

Manchester is one of only three centres in Britain awarded funding by Innovate UK, from the Industrial Strategy Challenge Fund, to coordinate a strategy to scale-up advanced therapies for a range of debilitating conditions. The centre, hosted at The Christie, will design and run larger clinical trials in this innovative area of personalised medicine.

As well as The Christie, the partnership consists of The University of Manchester (including input from Cancer Research UK Manchester Institute and Manchester Cancer Research Centre), Manchester University NHS Foundation Trust (including Royal Manchester Children’s Hospital and Manchester Royal Infirmary) and nine life science focused businesses.

AstraZeneca is one of nine businesses in the iMATCH (innovate Manchester Advanced Therapies Centre Hub) consortium and will be providing specific expertise through the iDecide programme, which is delivered by the digital Experimental Cancer Medicine Team (digitalECMT).

The digital ECMT will provide digital science expertise around the development of rapid turn-round monitoring capabilities and integration into digital algorithms to establish early-warning systems.

The iDecide programme is the focus of a five year collaboration between AstraZeneca, Cancer Research UK’s Manchester Cancer Research Institute, The Christie, and the University of Manchester.