SCIENTISTS in the North-East are set to spearhead a multimillion pound research project that could revolutionise treatment people with liver cancer – the fastest rising cause of cancer death in the UK.

Professor Helen Reeves and her team at Newcastle University will lead a joint UK and European project with around £5m funding to help find better treatments for the disease.

According to Cancer Research UK, liver cancer deaths have more than tripled in the UK since the 1970s and the disease is linked to smoking, infections, drinking too much alcohol, and being overweight or obese.

And while prevention measures are critical for tackling the disease, more research is needed to improve treatments and outcomes for patients.

Professor Reeves, who is Professor of liver cancer at the Northern Institute for Cancer Research and treats patients at Newcastle’s Freeman Hospital, said: “The North-East is probably one of the areas where the increase in liver cancer has been most striking.

“For advanced disease – where survival is extremely poor, only several months for some patients – we don’t have very effective treatments and it is soul destroying as a doctor to have nothing to offer to these patients.”

To accelerate progress into liver cancer research, Professor Reeves will lead a project to establish a European and UK network of clinicians and scientists specialising in hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) – the most common primary liver cancer in adults in the UK.

The researchers’ aim is to adapt immunotherapy treatments, which have shown an increase in survival in other cancer types, to treat HCC.

She added: “Our team thinks there’s great potential for immunotherapy to treat many more liver cancer patients, but first we need to deepen our understanding of the ways in which the cancer switches off the immune system – so we can develop a number of strategies to switch it back on.”

Newcastle will be the nerve centre for the multimillion pound project – sharing data with scientists across the UK and Europe.

It is funded by Cancer Research UK and two of Europe’s leading cancer research charities, Associazione Italiana per la Ricerca sul Cancro and Asociación Española Contra el Cáncer.