THE CHRISTIE HOSPITAL

Whilst staying at the Christie Hospital in Manchester, Tom became good friends with members of the medical team and in particular, Professor Was Mansoor, who was his lead clinician. Professor Mansoor is also chair of Systemic Therapy Research, Tom was very keen to help support the research set up by the Professor, the research that the team do can be divided into three parts:

Leading global research – As a global community, it was realised two decades ago that the biggest improvements in research that could be made for this cancer would be if key opinion leaders worked together collaboratively in designing and recruiting to trials as a global team. Since the community agreed to do this, they have now started making improvements in global outcomes. The success has been the biggest – introduction of immune-therapies. These therapies have now also received license and are now on formulary in use.
Immune related biomarker work – As new immune therapies come into clinical practice, there is an accepted unmet need that we don’t know who these therapies will benefit most and who the therapies will not benefit at all. To address this, Professor Mansoor has managed to attract a globally renowned scientist to work with him in finding the necessary biomarker for gastric and oesophageal cancer. The Dr has already done this for skin cancer and has already started working with the team and we are currently in the process of setting the research ethics and permission up to get this research started. A lot of the money raised would go towards this.
Nutrition Research – This was one of the dominant issues in Toms management and he knew a lot about this issue. Sadly, nutritional deficit is very common, multi-factorial and hugely prognostic. It is also under-researched and largely ignored by the specialists, Professor Mansoor set up a research group 5 years ago to address this unmet need and is pleased to say that they are making real in-roads into understanding these sets of conditions which lead to malnourishment which then leads to frailty. There is a research student who is doing a trial called ANCHOR which is the first trial of this kind in the world. Funding would also support this work.