Bob Champion was diagnosed with cancer in two parts of his body at the height of his racing career. The dream that kept him going, through the long months of chemotherapy, was that one day he might win the Grand National on Aldaniti.
Against all the odds, in 1981 his dream came true. Following racing’s greatest fairy-tale, The Bob Champion Cancer Trust was created.
Bob set up the Trust to support research into innovative treatments, diagnostics and strategies to help prevent male cancers.
Over many years the Trust has been funding male cancer research at the ICR. Their generous support includes jointly funding the building of the Male Urological Cancer Research Centre on our Sutton campus in 2000, and more recently a study which helps to determine a man’s risk of developing early onset prostate cancer.
Their latest award is funding a Post-Doctoral Fellow. Our scientists have developed a blood test to predict in advance whether prostate cancer patients are likely to become resistant to different treatments.
The Bob Champion Fellow is developing new computational approaches to analyse the data coming from these blood tests. Using this information, we will then create a clinically-applicable test that can be used on blood or tumour tissue in large-scale clinical trials. This will help us to predict how prostate cancer might progress prior to treatment and monitor a patients’ response, allowing us to stay one step ahead of cancer evolution.