Making the discoveries that defeat cancer

Sarcoma Accelerator Consortium

Our five-year project - the Sarcoma Accelerator Consortium - aims to produce a digital hub of clinical and research data on sarcomas, as well as cellular and animal models. This digital hub will help us predict and test patient responses to drugs for high-risk sarcomas using artificial intelligence.

Artificial intelligence graphic - shows plan view of brain with one hemisphere representing computer circuitry

The consortium is led by Professor Robin Jones, co-director of the Joint Sarcoma Research Centre at The Royal Marsden NHS Foundation Trust and the ICR.

The Sarcoma Accelerator Consortium is a multi-disciplinary and international team funded by Cancer Research UK and its European partners, Fondazione AIRC and Asociación Española Contra el Cáncer (AECC), through the Accelerator Awards scheme.

Research objectives

Patients with sarcoma have poor survival overall, and after surgery 50% see their disease spread to other organs, at which point it is incurable. Clinicians have had limited success with a ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach using pre-operative chemotherapy, and more personalised treatments are needed.

The core objectives of the Sarcoma Accelerator Consortium are to:

improve cure rates in adult patients with high-risk sarcomas
identify new drug targets for the neoadjuvant setting
develop pre-clinical models for understanding disease biology
and have patient-centred involvement through mobile app development for predicting disease relapse.

Co-investigators

The Sarcoma Accelerator Consortium includes teams based at the Institute of Cancer Research and Royal Marsden, University of Birmingham and The Queen Elizabeth Hospital, University of Glasgow, Beatson West of Scotland Cancer Centre, NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde, University of Edinburgh and Edinburgh Cancer Centre, Fondazione IRCCS – Istituto Nazionale dei Tumori – Milano, Instituto de Biomedicina de Sevilla and Hospital Universitario Virgen del Rocio.