PINCER

• Research type

  Research Study

• Full title

  Platform study for solid organ cancer

• IRAS ID

  343963

• Contact name

  Dale Vimalachandran

• Contact email

  dalevim@liverpool.ac.uk

• Sponsor organisation

  University of Liverpool

• Duration of Study in the UK

  10 years, 0 months, 0 days

• Research summary

  Solid organ cancers remain a significant healthcare problem. Surgical resection remains the mainstay of treatment for many patients but this often fails to secure long term control and is often associated with significant effects on quality of life and function. Recent developments have encouragingly revealed that more specific treatment aimed at the biology of the disease can be much more effective and, in some cases, reduce or even obviate the need for major surgery. However, much more work remains to be done and the UK and in particular, the Northwest remain significant negative outliers when it comes to cancer outcomes.
  There remains a clear and urgent need to better understand the biology of cancer and in particular understand the response of the disease to treatment options both in the short and long term. The proposed study builds on two existing studies to provide researchers with rapid access to biosamples (e.g. blood, tissue, urine etc) from patients undergoing treatment for solid organ cancers (e.g. bowel, breast, bladder, lung, head and neck, pelvic, gynaecological etc.).
  Patients will be asked to provide consent to access surplus tissue/blood taken as part of their normal care but may be asked to provide additional samples prior to, during or after treatment (separate and specific funding will be obtained when samples are provided at additional timepoints to standard of care sampling). Samples will be taken only to answer specific research questions from scientific (academic or commercial) collaborators and will be used to generate pilot/feasibility data to allow a full study to be developed. Such a study would require its own funding and ethical application; the PINCER study exists solely to allow the rapid and agile collection of tissue to generate the necessary pilot data to decide whether a scientific line of enquiry is worth pursuing.

• REC name

  East of England - Essex Research Ethics Committee

• REC reference

  24/EE/0138

• Date of REC Opinion

  12 Jun 2024

• REC opinion

  Further Information Favourable Opinion