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September 7, 2015
A European consortium focusing on uveal melanoma (UM) has just been awarded a Horizon 2020 grant of 6 million Euros. UM is a rare intraocular tumour with no effective treatment for the metastatic disease. The overall goal of the "UM Cure 2020" project is to increase our background knowledge of UM metastases, identify and validate novel therapeutic approaches for metastatic UM treatment at the preclinical level, ultimately leading up to the initiation of UM-dedicated clinical trials sponsored by academia or pharma.
For this purpose the Consortium, led by Dr. Sergio Roman-Roman (Institut Curie, Paris, France), brings together the major experts of UM in both patient care and basic/translational/clinical research, and in particular several European Centres of Excellence in clinical Ocular Oncology, as well as the patient organisation 'Melanoma Patient Network Europe', and the two biotech companies 'PamGene' and 'PEP-Therapy' with expertise in biomarkers and early clinical development, respectively.
The UM CURE 2020 consortium amongst others includes OOG and EVER Members, including Laurence Desjardins (Institut Curie, Paris; EVER Chair of PO Section), Nathalie Cassoux (Institut Curie, Paris; current OOG President) Sarah Coupland (Liverpool, UK; ARVO AP Board member, and immediate past President OOG), Martine Jager (Leiden, The Netherlands; long-standing OOG/EVER member and past-ARVO president), Gregorius Luyten (Leiden, The Netherlands), Bozena Romanowska-Dixon (Krakow, Poland, host of the 2014 OOG Spring meeting), as well as the Champalimaud Foundation (Lisbon, Portugal).
Further details on the UM Cure 2020 project will be available at project start, foreseen for the end of the year/beginning of next year, after the ongoing grant agreement preparation phase with the European Commission.