NEW YORK – Cancer Research UK on Wednesday said it has begun a multi-drug precision medicine trial for patients whose cancers bear a mutation that can be targeted by one of the trial drugs.
The DETERMINE platform trial aims to explore whether currently licensed drugs for common cancers could also benefit patients with rare cancer types outside of the original approved indications. The University of Manchester is leading the trial, which is being managed by Cancer Research UK's Centre for Drug Development. Roche is providing seven targeted drugs, and Cancer Research UK is seeking other pharmaceutical partners to contribute drugs as the trial progresses.
The Christie NHS Foundation Trust is the first trial site to open. The University of Glasgow, the Royal Marsden NHS Foundation Trust, the University of Birmingham, and the Experimental Cancer Medicines Centres will open additional sites.
The trial's adaptive design allows any drug which appears to be working in the trial to be submitted for review by the Cancer Drug Fund, which may decide to evaluate it as a routine treatment option in the NHS for that cancer type. In addition to informing patient selection, translational data collected from multiomic analysis in the trial will be used to discover new biomarker-driven therapies in rare and pediatric cancers.