Euro cancer research hub at Trent

Nottingham Trent University (NTU) will lead a pioneering European cancer research project worth £3m.

Scientists will try to identify an abnormal protein in the blood or tissue of patients with ovarian, breast or prostate cancer.

That could indicate whether they are likely to benefit from vaccine therapy.

NTU will manage the study from its Interdisciplinary Biomedical Research Centre, and will receive more than £1m towards the research.

ENACT partners include: Medical University of Sofia (Bulgaria) University of Tubingen (Germany) The Karolinska Institute(Sweden) Institut National de la Sante et de la Recherche medicale (France) Jagiellonian University (Poland) University of Latvia (Latvia) University of Granada (Spain) University of Heidelberg (Germany) The Radium Hospital (Norway) The Anthony Nolan Trust (UK) Loreus Ltd (UK) St Savas Cancer Hospital (Greece) Onyvax Ltd (UK)

Patients across Europe will be asked to take part in the study.

The identification of new "cancer biomarkers", from a blood sample, could tell whether a patient can respond to certain vaccinations.

And that could lead to finding new ways of producing vaccines to stimulate the body's immune system to kill off cancer cells.

The data from 13 European partners will be fed through the university and Loreus, a company based at its Clifton Campus, to process and analyse the results.

The project, called European Network for the Identification and Validation of Antigens and Biomarkers in Cancer and their Application in Clinical Tumour Immunology, will be funded by the European Union for three years.

Prof Robert Rees, from the university's School of Biomedical and Natural Sciences, said: "We will be using state-of-the-art technology to identify abnormal blood proteins and the immune response of patients against their cancer.

"This research will also be extremely helpful in assisting diagnosing and the knowledge we obtain could provide us the opportunity to develop new further diagnostic and predictive tests."