Scientists hope to trick cancer cells to prevent them becoming drug-resistant

The world’s first drugs aimed at stopping cancer cells becoming resistant to treatment could be available within the next decade, scientists have said.

Such medicines could help cancer patients live longer and better quality lives by making the condition manageable and “more often curable”, those behind a new centre dedicated to tackling the problem said.

The Institute for Cancer Research’s (ICR) chief executive Professor Paul Workman said drug resistance is the toughest challenge faced by those working against the disease.

He described a new research centre focusing on developing ways to get ahead of cancer’s lethal so-called “Darwinian” ability to evolve and become resistant as a “really exciting new development”.

The ICR is investing £75m in a new Centre for Drug Discovery at its Sutton campus, and is appealing for a further £15m to finish the project which it said will bring together almost 300 scientists from various fields to work together on stopping cancer’s evolution.

Existing treatments including chemotherapy sometimes fail because the deadliest cancer cells manage to adapt and survive, researchers said, prompting them to take a different tack.

Prof Workman said: “Cancer’s ability to adapt, evolve and become drug resistant is the cause of the vast majority of deaths from the disease and the biggest challenge we face in overcoming it.

“At the ICR, we are changing the entire way we think about cancer, to focus on understanding, anticipating and overcoming cancer evolution.

“If we can raise a further £15m to deliver our new Centre for Cancer Drug Discovery, we can bring together under one roof experts in cancer therapeutics alongside others studying evolution in animals, cells and individual patients, to create a new generation of cancer treatments.”

Scientists aim to use new approaches including multidrug combination treatments and artificial intelligence to “herd” cancer cells together.

Dr Andrea Sottoriva, who will be deputy director of cancer evolution in the new centre, said: “Artificial intelligence and mathematical predictive methods have huge potential to get inside cancer’s head and predict what it is going to do next and how it will respond to new treatments.

“Within our new Centre for Cancer Drug Discovery, we plan to use cancer’s survival instinct against it through an approach we call ‘evolutionary herding’.

“By encouraging cancer to evolve resistance to a treatment of our choice, we can cause it to develop weaknesses against other drugs, and hopefully send it down dead ends and to its own destruction.”

Researchers are already in the process of creating new drugs designed to stop the Apobec protein molecule, which normally helps the immune system adapt to different infectious diseases but can end up being hijacked in more than half of cancer types to speed up the evolution of drug resistance.

Researchers said they are hopeful that a new class of Apobec inhibitors could be given to patients alongside targeted cancer treatment to help keep the disease at bay for longer.

Dr Olivia Rossanese, who will be head of biology in the new centre, said: “We believe this will be the first treatment in the world that rather than dealing with the consequences of cancer’s evolution and resistance, aims to directly confront the disease’s ability to adapt and evolve in the first place.”

Prof Workman said the drugs will require laboratory testing and clinical trials over a period of around 10 years, before they could potentially become available for patients.

He added: “We firmly believe that, with further research, we can find ways to make cancer a manageable disease in the long term and one that is more often curable, so patients can live longer and with a better quality of life.”

Press Association