Kat Arney

Funding the very best science – how does it work?

Posted on May 13, 2013 by Kat Arney

We have a responsibility to spend our supporters’ donations wisely

Our research is funded by the public – around 80p in every pound donated to us is spent on this vital work – so we have a responsibility to make sure our supporters’ cash gets spent on the very best science that will make a difference to people with cancer.

We’ve written before about how our funding committees allocate millions of pounds, raised by our supporters, to scientists, doctors and nurses across the UK. But we thought it might be helpful to lift the lid on the finer points of our funding processes in a bit more detail.

The following story is an illustration of what happens when someone applies to us for funding.

We’ve changed the name of the researcher, but all the details are taken from a real-life situation.

Continue reading →

New type of bowel cancer discovered – but what does it mean?

Posted on April 14, 2013 by Kat Arney

Our researchers have found a new sub-type of bowel cancer

Thanks to advances in research over the years, we know more about cancer than ever before, with new discoveries being made all the time. In some cases this knowledge has led to life-saving new treatments. In others, it causes frustration and head-scratching until more pieces of the puzzle fall into place.

For example, why do some patients with the same type of cancer respond to a treatment but others don’t? And what makes some cancers grow and spread aggressively while others are less dangerous?

Thanks to research, answers to these questions are coming. Much of this progress hinges on the use of new technology to analyse the faulty genes in cancer cells, enabling researchers and doctors to characterise the molecular fingerprint of an individual person’s cancer and select the most appropriate treatment.

As an example, last year our scientists showed that, based on the genetic makeup of each patient’s disease, breast cancer can be divided into at least ten distinct subtypes, each with different outlooks and responses to treatment.

Now it’s bowel cancer’s turn under the spotlight, as researchers at our Cambridge Institute – along with colleagues in the Netherlands and Oxford – have discovered a new subtype of bowel cancer, which has a worse outcome than other types and is resistant to current targeted treatments.

Published in the journal Nature Medicine, their results have big implications for patients and future research. Continue reading →

Gene variations and cancer risk – more results, more answers and more questions

Posted on March 27, 2013 by Kat Arney

Scientists have found around eighty new gene variations linked to breast, prostate and ovarian cancers

A thousand scientists from one hundred international research groups working over four years. Thirteen papers spread across five journals. DNA analysis of two hundred thousand people. And eighty new genetic variations, or SNPs (pronounced “snips”) linked to three different types of cancer, doubling the current total known about so far.

These are impressive, big figures from an equally impressive, big piece of science, which Cancer Research UK helped to fund (here’s the press release). But what does it all mean?

To find out, we spoke to Professor Doug Easton from the University of Cambridge, one of the leaders of the project.

Cancer Research UK: What exactly are SNPs?

Prof Easton: SNP stands for “single nucleotide polymorphism”, and it’s a single ‘letter’ difference in the DNA between individuals. Your DNA is made up of around 3 billion of these ‘letters’ – there are four possible letters you can have: A, C, T and G – so a SNP is just a single place in your genome where you might have one particular letter, and someone else has a different one.

To explain a bit more about SNPs and what they do, have a look at this short animation:

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Blood test tracks breast cancer

Posted on March 13, 2013 by Kat Arney

A blood test could provide a simple way to monitor cancer

Cancer is a wily enemy. It mutates and spreads within the body and becomes resistant to treatment. Understanding and counteracting this tricksy behaviour is the greatest challenge for researchers and doctors, and is the key to bringing forward lasting cancer cures.

Thanks to advances in technology, we’re now starting to map out cancer’s underlying genetic landscape. In theory, if doctors knew exactly which gene faults were driving a patient’s cancer, they could give them the most appropriate targeted treatment.

And as well as selecting the therapy with the best chances of working, it’s also important to know whether the disease is responding to treatment or not as fast as possible, so doctors can decide on the best course of action – for example, whether to continue with a particular drug or switch to a different one.

But there’s a problem with this approach. Monitoring how well a patient’s cancer is responding is not a simple job. At a minimum, it requires regular scans or other tests. On top of this, analysing a tumour’s genes requires having a sample of it, usually taken as a biopsy with surgery, as well as access to tests that can provide meaningful results in a short timeframe. And if the cancer has spread to a multitude of locations in the body, it’s simply not possible to biopsy them all.

As an extra kicker, we now know that a single tumour can house cancer cells with a range of different gene faults – a characteristic that scientists refer to as “intra-tumoural heterogeneity”, but could also be described in rather more unpublishable words. And secondary cancers that have sprung up elsewhere in the body also have differences in their genetic makeup compared to the initial tumour.

The problems seem almost insurmountable – it’s a bit like trying to attack a shape-shifting army that we can’t properly see. But, as you might hope, research is coming to the rescue.

Building on work we talked about last year, scientists at our Cambridge Institute have made a significant step forward in developing a relatively simple genetic blood test that can monitor breast cancer as it progresses.

They’ve published their results in a paper in the New England Journal of Medicine, and although the title – “Analysis of circulating tumor DNA to monitor metastatic breast cancer” – may not set your heart racing, the contents are certainly inspiring for all of us hoping for progress in cancer research.
Continue reading →

Stargazing to spot cancer

Posted on February 20, 2013 by Kat Arney

Astronomical techniques could help analyse cancer samples

Today our researchers announce the results of an exciting project bringing together two unlikely scientific bedfellows – astronomy and pathology.

Back in 2010, Dr Raza Ali and his team at our Cancer Research UK Cambridge Institute joined forces with the University of Cambridge’s Institute of Astronomy to focus their techniques for scanning the night sky onto the challenge of spotting rogue cancer cells.

Spotting key differences between tumour samples holds the key to understanding why some cancers progress more quickly than others, and why patients respond differently to treatments. But despite increased automation in many areas, this kind of analysis still largely relies on expert pathologists looking down the microscope at tumour samples and scoring the presence of particular protein molecules.

Regular readers of the blog will know that Cancer Research UK recently launched the world’s first citizen science cancer project Cell Slider to help break this data bottleneck. But for some time, scientists have also been looking at ways to automate the process and train machines to do the hard work. Today, our scientists published their latest progress towards this goal.

Writing in the British Journal of Cancer, Dr Ali and his team show how the automated techniques the astronomers use to analyse deep sky images can also detect subtle differences in protein levels between healthy and cancerous breast cells.

Continue reading →

Tissue study turns tables on prostate cancer

Posted on December 20, 2012 by Kat Arney

A new study has lifted the lid on advanced prostate cancer

As we heard yesterday, a man’s lifetime risk of developing cancer is set to climb to one in two by 2027, and one of the biggest reasons is an increase in prostate cancer rates.

But research is bringing hope that more and more men will survive this disease and, based on recent progress, we have every reason to be optimistic.

Over the past couple of years we’ve made significant strides in prostate cancer research and treatment. This year the drug abiraterone (Zytiga), which our researchers helped to develop, was approved across the UK for men with advanced prostate cancer. And other important new drugs have emerged recently from research around the world and are showing promise in clinical trials, including enzalutamide (Xtandi), cabazitaxel (Jevtana) and radium-223 (Alpharadin).

Our researchers labs around the UK are also making progress in prostate cancer (such as in drug development, targeting cancer’s energy supply, finding gene faults that drive the disease and control how fast it grows and developing new types of therapy) and in the clinic (for example in hormone therapy, radiotherapy and more personalised treatment) as well as improving screening. And through our role in the International Genome Consortium prostate cancer project, we’re using the latest technology to understand prostate cancer’s genetic secrets and drive forward future advances.

It’s clear that momentum is gathering and things are moving faster than ever before. And now an important new study from scientists at our Cambridge Research Institute, published in the journal Cancer Cell, reveals a completely new gene network that can carry on driving advanced prostate cancer after patients become resistant to hormone treatment.

The findings paint a new picture of the processes that drive prostate cancer, and shed light on how we might be able to tackle it more effectively in the future. To find out more, watch this brilliant little video featuring lead researcher Naomi Sharma and some Lego:

Let’s look in a bit more detail at what the Cambridge team did, and how their discovery could help us beat prostate cancer sooner.

Continue reading →

2012 – A year of progress

Posted on December 17, 2012 by Kat Arney

This year has been as busy as ever and we’ve made great progress made in all aspects of our work, from lab research to clinical trials and policy to prevention. Here are some of our key successes in a couple of handy interactive timelines.

January to June:

July to December:

Click here for a text-only version of the timeline data.