Your support gives award-winning ideas a chance
The revolutionary thing about Pioneer Awards is that applicants can come from any discipline - from medicine to aeronautics - and be at any stage in their career. The only requirement is that their proposal has the potential to dramatically improve the lives of cancer patients. If successful, the innovator receives a grant of us to £200,000 to explore their fresh solution for cancer.
A bubbly drink that could treat cancer
We're all used to being told that fizzy drinks are bad for our health, but Professor Eleanor Stride is working on a bubbly drink in the lab and if it's successful it could one day help people cancer. Pancreatic cancer is difficult to treat, so this research could be the first step towards improving the outlook for patients.
We know that as tumours grow they become short of oxygen, causing cancer cells tgo adapt, making them more resistant to treatments such as radiotherapy and chemotherapy.
Professor Stride looked at the problem from a different angle. She wondered whether simply drinking specifically engineered oxygen bubbles could deliver oxygen to the heart of a tumour, without harmful side effects.
Now Professor Stride and her team at Oxford University are using their Pioneer Award to develop and test the effectiveness of their bubble theory. They are targeting pancreatic cacner first as these tumours are badly starved of oxygen and notoriously hard to treat. If it works, there is the potential to roll the approach out to other types of cancer too and save many more lives.
Number crunching could avoid unnecessary operations
Surgery is the most powerful tool we have for treating many cancers, but it isn't effective for every patient and it can be hard for surgeons to predict outcomes.
Professor Richard Edmondson is a Pioneer Award winner who turned to Big Data for the answer. His game-changing idea is to use large data sets and complex algorithms to predict who will benefit most from surgery.
This approach is widely used for banking and commerce decision making, now it could help clinicians decide if and when to operate and make sure those who do have surgery have the best possible treatment.
Rare metal could prevent brain tumours returning
A major challenge in cancer care is preventing brain tumours growing back after surgery. Dr Paul Brennan may have found a revolutionary answer.
His early research in the lab focuses on how to make brain tumour treatments more effective by implanting cancer drugs in the brain during surgery. But this doesn't work for all patients. Enter palladium, a rare metal that can convert harmless chemicals into powerful chemotherapy drugs. Paul's idea is to implant a palladium pellet that could transform inactive anti-cancer drugs into active ones specifically in the area where the tumour was removed. He's using this Pioneer Award to develop more effective drugs that could work with palladium.
Did you know?
The big sugar question
You wanted to know if there is a link between sugar and cancer. We asked our experts about eating too much sugar, weight gain and the effect this can have on our risk of cancer.
New cigarette law
Children will be protected from harmful tobacco packaging after a landmark legal victory you helped us win!
How your gifts help
Results of a recent radiotherapy clinical trial are already changing clinical practice in the UK and internationally, giving patients more choice about their treatment.