24 October 2014 - 24 October 2014 - The Chan Soon-Shiong Institute for Molecular Medicine (CSSIOMM) and the University of Oxford reported Thursday that they had entered into a partnership to establish the Chan Soon-Shiong Oxford Centre for Molecular Medicine (CSSOCMM), which, according to the partners, is the first of its kind in the United Kingdom and is designed to support the delivery of individualised, data-driven molecular based medicine for the benefit of NHS cancer patients.

The Chan Soon-Shiong Institute has made an initial commitment of USD 50 million (EUR 39.511m) to advance clinical cancer care in the UK via genomic and proteomic driven diagnoses. These funds will serve to equip doctors with large-scale sequencing capabilities for patient-level genomic, epigenomic, proteomic, and digital pathology data capture, as well as novel tools and super-computing technology to support critical decision making for cancer treatment. The CSSOCMM will collaborate closely with the Oxford University Hospitals NHS Trust.

The announcement for the partnership was made at a press conference in London at which the Minister for Life Sciences, George Freeman MP, presided. He called this investment a sign that Britain is leading the world in the new field of Genomic Medicine. Breakthroughs in the understanding of how genetics determines how disease really works in patients are of great importance to generating new treatments and medicines, Freeman added.

The investment highlights the international confidence in the UK's ability to develop better and more personalised cancer treatments which can make a substantial difference to patients, particularly in rare disease and cancer, Freeman further elaborated. He said that the Prime Minister and he are determined to make Britain the best place in the world to discover and develop 21st century medicines. This is the reason behind UK's investment in the 100,000 Genomes project, to create the world's first large scale hub of genetic and disease data, Freeman explained. The partnership with the Institute for Molecular Medicine will help offer new treatments to NHS patients, he added.

Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong, founder and chairman of the CSSIOMM, said that using the most advanced, sophisticated tools imaginable, the two partners have embarked on a mission to solve the mystery of cancer, and set up an adaptive learning system where the power of one can inform many. The infrastructure to manage big data needs to be established to enable a national network of clinical scientists in the UK, he noted, A portion of the USD 50 million commitment will be used to fund the capital needs to make sure patients across England could benefit from this genomic platform, with the remaining USD 35 million provided to support the operations of the Chan Soon-Shiong Oxford Centre for Molecular Medicine at Oxford, Soon-Shiong explained.

This is the third partnership announced by the Chan Soon-Shiong Institute of Molecular Medicine this year. The Providence Health System, one of the largest hospital systems spanning 5 Western states in the USA, and Phoenix Children's Hospital were the two recipients of CSSIOMM grants in the past six months.

The CSSOCMM will get a USD 35 million grant to utilise next-generation patient information systems needed to support the acquisition and usage of high-quality sequencing data. This will enable new approaches to therapeutic decisions, drug discovery capabilities, machine learning predictive modelling and support for clinical studies to assess the impact of therapeutic interventions in large patient populations through the CSSOCMM.

Sir John Bell, professor of Medicine at the University of Oxford, said that via the partnership with CSSIOMM, scientists are furthering their ability to use cutting edge technologies to allow radically new approaches to cancer care. The partnership will enable a new understanding of how large amounts of genomic and other molecular data can be combined with clinical data to reveal much more about a patient's cancer. The data will provide a rich resource for cancer research, drive the development of new drugs and support the design of clinical studies. Ultimately, the treatment course a patient receives will be determined by the characteristics of the cancer they have, Bell concluded.

The CSSOCMM will be co-located with the new Precision Cancer Medicine Institute, also announced yesterday, where the clinical applications of its research will take place. The centre will have strong links with the Target Discovery Institute and Big Data Institute, all part of the major investment in cancer diagnosis and treatment being made by the University of Oxford over the next five years - the most comprehensive investment in this area of any UK University.

(USD 1.0 = EUR 0.790)