The team is among 12 international groups selected from over 220 expressions of interest submitted to Cancer Grand Challenges, a global funding initiative co-founded by Cancer Research UK and the US National Cancer Institute. Each shortlisted team is now competing for up to £20 million in funding to pursue bold, cross-disciplinary research that could transform cancer treatment.
REWIRE-CAN, led by Prof. Bart Vanhaesebroeck and including Prof. Chris Tape from the UCL Cancer Institute, is shortlisted against the ‘rewiring cancer cells’ challenge. This challenge aims to to fundamentally alter how cancer cells behave, potentially steering them toward less malignant states or making them more vulnerable to treatment.
Focusing on colorectal cancer, REWIRE-CAN’s multidisciplinary team of scientists from the UK, Netherlands and USA, plan to tackle the challenge by turning cancer’s own survival mechanisms against itself, transforming what was an advantage into a disadvantage.
Cancer cells finely tune their signalling levels, selecting for an optimal level of signalling to drive their growth, rather than an extremely high level, which may trigger stress responses. It’s like how one cup of coffee can wake you up and allow you to focus on your work, whereas multiple cups might leave you feeling anxious and unable to concentrate. The team aims to take advantage of this, developing precise signalling modulators to disrupt this finely tuned ‘Goldilocks’ state. The team also plans to rewire treatment-resistant cancer cells to become sensitive ones.
REWIRE-CAN team’s work has the potential to transform treatment options and patient outcomes in colorectal cancer and provide a roadmap for rewiring of cancer cells across tumour types.
Each of the 12 shortlisted teams will now receive seed funding to get their ideas off the ground and develop their full proposal. Winners will be announced in March 2026 at the Cancer Grand Challenges Summit.
Rather than siloed laboratories making incremental progress, Cancer Grand Challenges has shown that integrated effort creates momentum greater than the sum of its parts, shifting the timeline toward near-future clinical impact.
The REWIRE-CAN consortium comprises the following teams:
- Cell Signalling (Oncology) | UCL Faculty of Medical Sciences
- Cell Communication Lab | Prof. Chris Tape | UCL Cancer Institute
- Roger Williams - MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology
- Vivian Li | The Francis Crick Institute
- Madelon Maurice lab | UMC Utrecht
- The Karuna Ganesh Lab | Sloan Kettering Institute
- Sellers Lab | Broad Institute
- krishnaswamylab.org | Yale University
