The EU-funded TRANSCAN-3 project is bringing together 21 funding organisations from 15 countries, with the common goal of supporting high-impact translational cancer research. Through cross-national joint calls for proposals and making the most of international and interregional cooperation, TRANSCAN-3 aims to provide influential contributions as well as a sustainable model of funding for ground-breaking translational cancer research in Europe and beyond.
2024 Call: Combination therapies against cancer: new opportunities for translational research
Despite advances in targeted therapies, immunotherapies, or radiotherapy, different obstacles, and challenges remain to be solved. Current limitations of in vitro personalized systems allowing a fast and reliable testing, new platforms to achieve combination therapy screening, new methods to achieve synergism in combination therapy and new combinations of radiotherapy with drugs or immunotherapy, remain, slowing down further applications of combination therapy in the clinic. Thus, there is a need for the identification of new and fast strategies to assay for individualized combination therapies that may help in the clinic to overcome tumour resistance and improve clinical outcomes avoiding undesired side effects. This topic should evolve from the laboratory to favour the clinical implementation of the strategies from the bench to the bedside.
The main purpose of this call will be design of patient preclinical models for combination therapies. Translational research using tumour samples collected from retrospective and/or prospective cohorts of patients.
Projects should be built from a solid and established hypothesis and should be relevant regarding the potential improvements in clinical practice.
Aim 1. Development of new tumour derived models to test new drug combination therapies.
Isolation and characterization of tumour cells/tumour-infiltrating immune/stromal cells for in vitro studies (3D culture systems; patient-derived organoids; patient-derived xenografts). These models should be a suitable tool to test new drug combinations or genetic perturbations to demonstrate the feasibility and applicability in terms of reproducibility and testing time (the faster the better) to this aim.
Aim 2. Design and development of high-throughput drug combination screening platforms to test new combination therapies.
This aim should include and comprise in the platform design to test combination therapies: primary cell cultures derived from patients, should be able to give rapid assessment of novel drugs, drug combinations or with radiotherapy combination at the individual patient level, combine genomic information, computational tools to predict drug responses for individual cancer patients. Protocols for dose response matrix drug combination assays, as well as computational tools to facilitate the plate design and synergy modelling, development of tailored software tools for high-throughput drug combination scoring.
Aim 3. Use of immunotherapy and radiotherapy combinations strategies to overcome drug resistance.
Radiotherapy can provoke a systemic immune response (due to abscopal effect) which gives a strong rationale for the combination of radio and immunotherapy. This aim should explore synergistic effect of radiation (including hypofractionated RT, multi-site radiation, low-dose radiation, new radiation technologies such as FLASH RT, proton RT), with checkpoint inhibitors, characterize the effect on the immune cells including the molecular mechanism and possible immune response biomarkers.
View full call text on transcan.eu
FUNDING & DURATION
The FNR supports this call with 350,000 EUR.
Max. project duration: 3 years.
APPLICATION INFORMATION
- Both pre- and full proposals must be written in English and must be submitted by the coordinator of the project as PDF files, using the form that can be downloaded from the electronic submission system or from the TRANSCAN website.
- The submission must be made through the dedicated electronic submission system PT-Outline. Registration is required before submission of the proposal.
- Luxembourg partners must submit both pre and full proposals, along with the FNR INTER Call documents to the FNR no later than 7 working days after the JTC deadline. Applications to the FNR must be submitted via the FNR’s Online Grant Management System.
Call timeline
The call is planned to be launched on 26 April 2024 with a submission deadline for pre-proposals on 5 July, 2024. It is expected that consortia invited to the full-proposal stage will be asked to submit their proposal on 29 November, 2024.
Full details will be coming soon.