Research Interest

Sarcoma Unit and Sarcoma Clinical Trials Team

The Sarcoma Unit at the Royal Marsden NHS Foundation Trust is currently seeing >800 new patients a year for advice and treatment. It has experts in every diagnostic and treatment discipline and in the area of diagnostics, histopathology is supported by a full range of molecular diagnostic tools, including FISH, PCR and mutational analysis. Underpinning our clinical research we have an interactive prospectively maintained database, which has data on >8500 patients. These data have helped generate 25 papers in the last five years. Much of the clinical data are linked to archived pathology samples and molecular data.

The Unit is a member of the EORTC Soft Tissue and Bone Sarcoma Group and the NCRI Sarcoma Clinical Studies Group. Prof Judson has played a number of key roles in these Groups, having been Chairman of both, and is chief investigator for a number of national and international trials. The current trials portfolio consists of over 20 studies in various stages including follow up, active recruitment, initiation and planned. These include a radiotherapy / surgery trial, a quality of life / utility study in patients with advanced sarcoma, and various trials of novel agents.

Of particular interest is a study with the VEGFR inhibitor cediranib in alveolar soft part sarcoma. This is a randomised phase II trial, supported AstraZeneca through the NCRN and funded by CTAAC. The ICR is the sponsor and it will be run by the ICR Clinical Trials Unit, it is also international and is due to involve the national sarcoma groups of France, Italy, Spain and Australia. This will be a very useful model for international collaboration on academic sarcoma trials. We will be doing a window study with another angiogenesis inhibitor, pazopanib, in patients with resectable sarcomas, which will incorporate serial biopsies and functional imaging (DC and DW Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) and Dynamic Contrast ultrasound (US).