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The National Translational Cancer Research Network

The emergence of the new National Cancer Research Network (NCRN) to support clinical trials in England and coordinated from the clinical trials centre in Leeds has been discussed in this column in the past. Another parallel, the National Translational Cancer Research Network (NTRAC), has now being set up amid much discussion on its implications for existing institutions. The overall remit of NTRAC is to “help improve the quality of cancer care by creating a national network of cancer research centres, embedded in the NHS, that integrates scientific and clinical expertise, and shares knowledge and resources for the benefit of cancer patients”. As the NTRAC website (http://www.ntrac.org.uk/about_folder/aboutset.html) explains the aim is to …”integrate the expertise of the bench researcher with the front-line clinician in a network of centres with the capability to support translational research. The principal aim of NTRAC is to build research infrastructure and workforce capacity that will support the advancement of novel anti-cancer therapeutics from the laboratory into the clinic and to test their promise in early clinical trials and diagnostics. We aspire to put the Network on a par with the best in the world, and to establish the Network as a national and international leader in its approach to the integration of research, treatment and care for cancer patients.”

Very laudable aims, but as the new Director points out, there are already many existing centres that have been doing this type of research (often with inadequate support and recognition) and whom are anxious to see where they will fit into this brave new world. For example, NTRAC has so far awarded full Network Centre status and funding to ten centres (Birmingham; Cambridge; Imperial College London; Leeds / Bradford; Manchester; Oxford; Newcastle; Royal Marsden; Southampton; and University College London) with each receiving around £1m funding over 5 years. One of the technologies supported will be the tissue banks associated with large phase III clinical trials. But what is to become of the existing tissue banking projects (especially if outside the ‘big ten’) which have been built up after years of hard work by dedicated researchers often using “soft monies,” during an era when there was little or no governmental interest in such research?

This issue has not yet been resolved to anyone’s satisfaction, but there is another even more serious problem with tissue banks. In the wake of the Alder Hey inquiry, we now have the ethical problem of informed consent and the use of patient-derived tumour tissue in clinical research. Most existing stored tumour tissue was obtained in an era when explicit consent was not obtained for such research, in keeping with practice at that time. Future studies will need to address this issue with explicit statements within consent forms, but there is some doubt over the standing of current tissue banks that needs to be urgently resolved. NTRAC is leading the representations to government, and hopefully this temporary brake on cancer research will be removed to the benefit of all including our patients.