A programme to test cancer patients for 97 genes that increase cancer risk will be piloted at a London hospital and funded by the Wellcome Trust.

The tests, which will start with women who have breast or ovarian cancer in 2014, aim to make genetic risk testing a standard feature of NHS cancer treatment.

The results will be used to select targeted drugs, and could influence other treatment decisions such as the extent of surgery.

Knowledge of genetic risks could also affect the health decisions of relatives of cancer patients.

The testing programme, which will be run by the Institute of Cancer Research and the Royal Marsden Hospital, London, is the first attempt to use mass genetic risk testing as a core aspect of cancer treatment.

Genetic mutations are responsible for 15% of ovarian cancers and around 2% of all cancers. The BRAC gene mutation in women increases the risk of breast cancer to as high as 80%.

The genetic tests were developed by biotechnology company Illumina.

According to Prof. Nazneen Rahman, lead investigator of the programme, knowledge of genetic risk factors “allows more personalised treatment, so for example such people are often at risk of getting another cancer and may choose to have more comprehensive surgery, or may need different medicines, or extra monitoring.”

Prof. Peter Johnson, chief clinician at Cancer Research UK, said: “This exciting new initiative will help embed genetic testing into routine NHS cancer care, and hopefully allow more cancer patients to benefit from genetic testing – and more personalised care – in the future.”

GSK has received £5m funding from the Wellcome Trust to support its collaborative work aimed at developing new drugs for diseases of the developing world.

The ‘open innovation’ research facility at Tres Cantos, Madrid, brings GSK’s drug discovery specialists together with 27 external researchers.

The funding will help to build on early-stage research to develop new medicines for tropical diseases including malaria, TB, Leishmaniasis and sleeping sickness.

The Open Lab facility, created by GSK in 2010, aims to develop two significant experimental drugs over the next five years, based on the most promising early-stage research both at Tres Cantos and at GSK.

GSK’s commitment to ‘open innovation’ was signalled by CEO Andrew Witty’s comment in 2012 that “the market has failed” to bring forward new drugs that are needed but will not generate immediate high revenues.

Dr Nick Cammack, Head of GSK’s Tres Cantos Medicines Development Campus, said: “This support highlights a growing recognition that collaborative and open research is the key to tackling these devastating diseases.

“Since adopting an open approach to discovering new medicines for developing world diseases, we’ve hosted some of the world's brightest academic scientists at Tres Cantos. The fusion of their academic excellence with GSK expertise has yielded some really exciting research projects.

“This tremendous show of support from the Wellcome Trust means we now have the potential to start driving these projects further towards finding new medicines.”

The Wellcome Trust is an independent global charitable foundation that supports research to improve human and animal health.

Dr Richard Seabrook, the Trust’s Head of Business Development, commented: “Academic researchers are making incredible progress in our understanding of neglected diseases, yet we’ve still got a bottleneck when it comes to the development of new drugs.

“Taking a more collaborative approach, as GSK have through their open lab, will see these advances reap the full benefit of the industry’s commercial expertise to give us the best chance of securing new treatments for these devastating diseases.”

The ABPI has completed its senior team of directors after appointing Dr Bina Rawal as its new Medical, Innovation and Research Director.

Dr Rawal will be responsible for advancing the productivity of the innovation process in the UK and will be the senior medical spokesperson for the ABPI to the Government, the media and other professional bodies.

Stephen Whitehead, ABPI Chief Executive, said the new recruit joins at a “critical time for industry” and said Bina’s experience will “complement that of our members to champion science, discovery, research and development”.

The new innovation lead joins the ABPI from the Wellcome Trust, where she served as Head of Clinical Development within the Technology Transfer Division. Prior to that, Dr Rawal held senior roles at Roche and GlaxoWellcome.

“I am very pleased to be joining the ABPI team and members to lead the campaigns on innovation,” she said. “The pharmaceutical industry plays a vital role as a health care provider in the UK and research and development are an integral part of the patient journey through the NHS.”

A new £50m investment fund aims to help UK companies bridge the translation gap between cancer drug discovery and early-stage product development.

The CRT Pioneer Fund, with equal contributions from Cancer Research Technology (CRT) and the European Investment Fund (EIF), aims to take cancer drug candidates from discovery through to phase II clinical trials.

The new fund was welcomed by the Bioindustry Association (BIA), the trade association for the UK bioscience sector, who said it came at “a particularly good time for life sciences in the UK”.

The fund’s starting capital of £25m will be doubled by the founders and/or potentially other investors.

CRT is the commercial arm of Cancer Research UK, whose widespread research networks will provide projects for the investment of at least two-thirds of the new fund, with the rest coming from other academic groups or industry.

David Willetts (pictured), Minister for Universities and Science, said: “In our Strategy for UK Life Sciences we set out ambitious plans to build on the success of the industry by fostering collaboration between our excellent research base and businesses. This initiative from Cancer Research Technology and the European Investment Fund will complement this work extremely well.”

“The creation of this landmark fund addresses the problem of funding the development gap which is restraining cancer drug development in the UK,” said Dr Keith Blundy, CEO of CRT.

“This important investment means we can take forward the most innovative approaches using our in-house drug discovery and development capabilities, to progress promising treatments from the lab all the way to clinical trials, translating our world-class scientific research into new treatments more quickly.”

Richard Pelly, EIF Chief Executive, noted: “This investment targets a stage of the investment spectrum often neglected by the market. The CRT Pioneer Fund will primarily follow a licensing model rather than creating companies.”

Glyn Edwards, BIA Interim Chief Executive, commented: “The launch of the CRT Pioneer Fund will provide another financing option for companies and academics in the UK looking to translate their cancer drug discoveries into clinical development.

“The fund arrives at a particularly good time for life sciences in the UK, following the launch last week by the Wellcome Trust of a £200 million venture fund and GlaxoSmithKline’s decision to invest £500 million in biopharmaceutical manufacturing in the UK.”

GlaxoSmithKline and Johnson & Johnson, in partnership with venture capital firm Index Ventures, are launching a €150m fund for biotechnology start-ups.

The money will be invested primarily in European companies with one or two significant projects under way that “have first-in-class or best-in-class mechanisms of action and target areas of unmet medical need”.

This follows the Wellcome Trust’s announcement of its £200m fund to support early-stage biotech companies in the UK and Europe.

GSK and J&J will each contribute a quarter of the €150m fund, with the rest to be invested by Index’s existing partners.

Moncef Slaoui, Head of R&D at GSK, said: “This unique collaboration shows our commitment to the biotech ecosystem and to continuously pursuing creative new ways to access groundbreaking new science.”

With its “unique platform of entrepreneurs” and “asset centric investing model”, he noted, “Index is well positioned to create an exciting pipeline.”

Paul Stoffels, Chairman of J&J’s pharmaceuticals business, commented that “new and creative approaches to funding early-stage innovation are crucial to the development of transformative medicine”.

The Wellcome Trust has created Sigma, a new business with initial capital of £200m to provide funding and guidance to emerging biotech companies.

Sir Mark Walport, Director of the Trust, said the new company has a long-term perspective, aiming “to give small and medium-sized companies the support they require to fulfil their potential”.

Counterfeit and substandard antimalarial drugs are undermining the war against malaria in Africa, a new report has claimed.

Researchers from the Wellcome Trust-Mahosot Hospital-Oxford University Tropical Medicine Research Collaboration warned that drugs with incorrect doses, or with erroneous active ingredients, could increase drug resistance in malaria patients.

The report, which called for urgent action to save millions of lives worldwide, identified two problems: fake drugs being sold fraudulently, and substandard drugs arising from poor manufacturing.

The recommended antimalarial drugs are artemisinin derivatives, used as monotherapy or in combination with other drugs.

The researchers gathered medication data from 11 nations in Africa between 2002 and 2010.

They identified many drugs used to treat malaria that contained erroneous active ingredients, treating the symptoms but not the disease itself.

In addition, they identified drugs with small quantities of the correct active ingredient – sufficient to pass chemical tests, but more likely to cause resistance to artemisinin without benefiting the patient.

Some of the fake antimalarials were traced to China.

Study leader Dr Paul Newton said: “Malaria can be readily treated with the right drugs of good quality, but poor-quality medicines – as well as increasing mortality and morbidity – risk exacerbating the economic and social impact of malaria. Worse still, they encourage drug resistance, potentially resulting in the failure of artemisinin treatments. Failure to take action will put at risk the lives of millions of people, particularly children and pregnant women.”

He also recommended that clinicians fighting malaria rely exclusively on combination therapies, which are harder to counterfeit.

“This research is very worrying and should act as an early warning,” said Dr Jimmy Whitworth, Head of International Activities at the Wellcome Trust. “We have already begun to see the emergence of drug-resistant malaria parasites in South-East Asia; substandard and counterfeit antimalarials and the availability of artemisinin monotherapies threaten to lead to the spread of drug resistance in Africa. If this happens, the effect could be devastating on efforts to control malaria in Africa."

Malaria caused approximately 781,000 deaths worldwide in 2009, according to the World Malaria Report 2010.