Our innovative research portfolio

For the current funded period (2025–2030), we're focused on a set of priority research themes where we're uniquely positioned to accelerate progress in cancer early detection and interception.

Each theme is supported by investment in research infrastructure and by patient and public involvement and engagement, ensuring our work stays grounded in patient priorities and focused on improving outcomes.

If you're based at one of our member centres and have ideas for additional engagement around our research themes, please get in touch.

Immunology

Harnessing the immune system for cancer early detection.

Inequalities

Understanding and addressing cancer inequalities in early detection.

Inherited cancers

Investigating hereditary cancer populations to understand disease initiation and inform early detection and interception strategies.

Interception

Detecting and understanding pre-cancerous changes to identify targets for precision cancer interception.

During our first funded period (2019–2024), we established a diverse collaborative research portfolio covering multiple cancer types, including breast, lung, prostate and pancreatic tumours. Our portfolio covered the full research pipeline, from basic biology to translational and pre-clinical science.

Across the Alliance, we awarded 75 collaborative grants through:

• Programme Awards

• Project Awards

• Pilot Awards

• Pathway Awards

• Skills Exchange Awards

Discover research case studies

Explore our publications

RESEARCH CASE STUDY

Identifying women at risk of developing cancer at the pre-cancerous stage requires collaboration across disciplines, and ACED has made that possible.

- Filipe Correia Martins, NEMO Consortium Co-lead, University College London

Accelerating early detection through collaboration

Through ACED, Filipe and Christine Schmidt (The University of Manchester) helped establish the NEMO (Novel Early Markers of Ovarian Cancer) Consortium, creating shared ways of working across institutions. ACED supported regular cross‑disciplinary workshops, aligned protocols for patient recruitment and sample collection, and facilitated data and resource sharing. Together, this enabled geographically dispersed teams to operate as a single, coordinated research effort. This harmonised, multi-institutional framework is accelerating progress towards identifying early markers of ovarian cancer.

Our researchers are developing shared resources to accelerate progress across the Alliance. These include diverse patient cohorts, high-quality datasets and platforms that support biomarker discovery and validation.

One example is our pilot study, ABIDE (Addressing the Base Error Impeding the Development of biomarkers for Early detection), which is establishing a critical resource for validating early detection biomarkers. ABIDE links serial pre‑diagnostic imaging with biological sampling. This will create a unique dataset that can determine when non‑imaging biomarkers begin to signal cancer before it becomes visible on conventional imaging.