EVOLUTIONARY THERAPY

Organization
Anticancer Fund
Type
Foundation
Application Due Date
03-01-2021
Comments
LOI due 3/1/21.
Brief Description

From AF's webpage:

EVOLUTIONARY THERAPY

Request for Application (RFA)

Submission deadline - 1 March 2021, 23:59 CET

Scope of this RFA

This Request for Application (RFA) seeks to increase clinical trial activity of evolutionarily informed therapeutic strategies aiming at improving survival outcomes of cancer patients.

Knowledge about tumour evolutionary dynamics has been growing rapidly. However, there has been a limited translation of that knowledge into therapeutic trials. The most clinically advanced strategy is adaptive therapy. Adaptive therapy is a treatment strategy attempting to prolong response to treatment by delaying the emergence of resistance. The goal of adaptive therapy is to maintain a controllable stable tumour burden by allowing a significant population of treatment-sensitive cells to survive. The main principle of the intervention is to control the tumour and prolong survival by allowing on/off treatment periods based on a valid marker.

This RFA will accept clinical trials on adaptive therapy and any other evolutionarily informed strategy, as long as they meet all criteria (see eligibility criteria below).

We encourage investigators working on evolutionarily informed strategies (including adaptive therapy) to apply for funding for their clinical trial evaluating such approach in cancer patients.

For further information on what is seen as evolutionarily informed strategies and adaptive therapy, we would like to refer applicants to a recent article by Gatenby & Brown (Gatenby RA, Brown JS. Integrating evolutionary dynamics into cancer therapy. Nat Rev Clin Oncol 2020; 17: 675–86).