GLASGOW scientists are set to benefit from one of the biggest funding grants awarded by Cancer Research UK.

Researchers at the Cancer Research UK Beatson Institute will receive a "transformative" £1.8 million over the next five years as part of a £19m investment in a global project to investigate why some cancers are specific to certain tissues and not others.

The funding for the ground-breaking project will come from Cancer Research UK’s Grand Challenge awards – set up to revolutionise the prevention, diagnosis and treatment of cancer.

Professor Owen Sansom, Director of the Cancer Research UK Beatson Institute, said: “This Cancer Research UK Grand Challenge funding will be transformative.

"It will allow us to work together with some of the best research groups from around the world and to do some really exciting and ambitious research to try and find an answer to this key question about early disease in cancer.”

The Glasgow scientists are part of a team of researchers from Manchester, the US and the Netherlands who beat stiff international competition to secure the funding.

They will bring their world-leading expertise in bowel cancer to the pioneering project, which was selected by an international panel of experts from a shortlist of ten exceptional, multi-disciplinary collaborations from universities, institutes and industry across the globe.

Cancer Research UK’s Grand Challenge was established to help scientists attack some of the hardest, unanswered questions in cancer research.

The international project team is looking to understand why genetic faults only affect certain tissues.

Professor Sansom added: "With this £1.8m funding we will try to uncover why we only see the APC mutation in bowel cancer; why not breast cancer or skin cancer?

“If we can work out the reason this gene mutation doesn’t cause cancer in these other organs, then our hope is we might be able to find a way to make the bowel resistant to the APC mutation and prevent cancer from developing.”

Dr Victoria Steven, Cancer Research UK spokeswoman for Scotland, said: “Grand Challenge gives us the perfect opportunity to address complex questions and cross new frontiers in our understanding of cancer, to transform the lives of patients.

"People in Scotland have every right to feel proud of the world-class research taking place on their doorstep and of their fundraising efforts, which are helping to beat cancer."