Earlier this month we announced trial results showing that giving patients with colon cancer (bowel cancer that originates in the colon) a short course of chemotherapy before surgery, could significantly shrink their tumour. This makes the tumour easier and safer to remove, potentially reducing the chances of it coming back.
We caught up with trial leader Professor Dion Morton, a surgeon based at the University of Birmingham, to find out when patients might begin to benefit from this potentially exciting advance.
In this month’s podcast, we hear how a third of cancers in the elderly are diagnosed through an emergency hospital admission and take a look at a report calling on dentists to help spot mouth cancer.
We also talk about how our scientists uncovered a new breast cancer drug target and the launch of a new cancer trial looking at a chemical related to those found in cannabis.
And finally we kick off breast cancer awareness month with an update on the latest experimental treatments, plus we ask you to Stand Up To Cancer.
Listen and download now through the player below or on Soundcloud:
We hope you enjoy it – please do let us know what you think of the podcast in the comments below, leave us a comment on the SoundCloud player, or email us at podcast@cancer.org.uk.
Wendy Powell took part in the early clinical trial
Last week we reported on the success of a major bladder cancer trial, funded by Cancer Research UK.
The practice-changing trial will mean that, in future, fewer of the thousands of patients diagnosed with the disease each year will need their bladder removed, and, in some cases, their womb and ovaries or prostate and urethra too (since these are the areas where the cancer is most likely to return).
Removing the bladder is a major operation with implications for the rest of a patient’s life. As the disease is linked to smoking and around eight out of ten cases diagnosed in patients over 65, some patients are in relatively poor general health when diagnosed and so unable to cope with such radical surgery.
Until recently the only alternative has been radiotherapy. But around a third of patients given radiotherapy eventually relapse with invasive disease and so need to have their bladder removed anyway.
To try to improve things, researchers based at the University of Birmingham and The Institute for Cancer Research in Sutton, funded by Cancer Research UK, have been looking for better alternatives.
A new clinical trial is looking at the best way to treat womb cancer.
When it comes to cancer, radiotherapy is a mainstay of modern day cancer treatment. As we recently highlighted, it’s a little known fact it plays a key role in treating around four in ten people with cancer. But sometimes radiotherapy on its own isn’t enough, particularly if the cancer is advanced or has spread to other parts of the body. So the combined forces of chemotherapy and radiotherapy are often used together.
Each treatment has its unique merits: radiotherapy delivers a localised attack to destroy the primary tumour – the cancer’s chief stronghold. Meanwhile, chemotherapy travels around the bloodstream to try and kill off any dividing cancer cells that may have broken rank and started growing elsewhere.
For several types of cancer, this combo of chemotherapy and radiotherapy together has been proven to reduce the likelihood of any remaining cancer cells being able to regroup and start growing elsewhere in the body as a secondary tumour.
There’s a lot of research looking to establish the best treatment for cancers that start in the womb (endometrium). And in particular who should have what. Researchers in the USA and Europe have looked at using both chemotherapy and radiotherapy after surgery for women at a high risk of the cancer coming back.
This combined treatment has been useful in other gynaecological cancers. But there’s not yet enough proof to say whether it should become routine. So a group of London-based researchers, with help from Cancer Research UK funding, are now running a clinical trial to find out if having radiotherapy and chemotherapy after surgery could further improve the outlook for womb cancer patients.
Watch this short video – featuring trial co-ordinator Dr Melanie Powell – to find out more about the PORTEC-3 trial and how it could bring benefits to women with womb cancer:
Every time a cell divides, its chromosomes go through a country dance. Forming pairs, they line up in a neat row, facing each other, before dramatically shimmying to opposite ends of the room along long ‘spindles’ of protein.
Having split its dancing partners, the cell pinches itself in two and separates them forevermore. The spindle is a crucial part of this dance: without it, the chromosomes never separate and the cell can’t divide.
To try to exploit this, some cancer drugs such as taxanes work by interfering with cancer cells’ spindles, stopping them from dividing. But over time, tumour cells can adapt to become resistant to these drugs.
This can be particularly frustrating in treating ovarian cancers. Often patients fare extremely well after their first round of chemo, only to find their cancer starts growing again. This makes the disease particularly difficult to treat, as patients often need many rounds of chemotherapy.
Recognising this, an international research group led by one of our scientists, Dr Ahmed Ahmed, who has recently moved from the University of Cambridge to Oxford University, and Dr Robert Bast, from the University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center, has been trying to crack this problem by hunting down the genes responsible for this resistance, with the ultimate aim of developing new drugs to overcome the problem.
Their latest, somewhat surprising discovery was revealed in Cancer Cell this week. The team has found a new player in ovarian cancer drug resistance – a gene previously only known to be involved in helping fat and liver cells recover from starvation. It now turns out this gene also plays a key role in helping the spindle form during cell division, and thus helping cancer’s genetic dancers do their dance.
Here’s a short interview with Dr Ahmed, explaining more about the team’s research and what they found:
Fact or fiction - What really causes breast cancer?
When it comes to what causes breast cancer, the evidence can be confusing. And the constant flow of often conflicting reports in the media does little to help matters. This is why we provided some advice to the Daily Mail for a recent feature on the evidence behind a range of different breast cancer risk factors.
Knowing which risk factors are genuine, and which are merely hearsay, isn’t always easy and requires a robust understanding of the evidence at hand. In this case, we closely supported the journalist to provide an overview of the evidence behind a dozen of the most well-known breast cancer risk factors – some genuine, and some less so.
Sifting through the evidence, we picked out risk factors that have a strong body of evidence to back them up, such as alcohol, being overweight and having children later in life. We also highlighted those which are lacking in evidence or based on fundamentally flawed studies, such as the link between breast cancer and cleaning products we recently blogged about, and the urban myth that underwired bras can cause the disease.
A molecular "relay race" could lead to a new treatment for cancer
A big problem in cancer treatment is how to deliver enough of the drugs needed to treat the tumour without causing excessive side effects. To make matters worse, cancers can develop resistance to drugs over time, meaning that increasingly higher doses and more potent cocktails of drugs are often needed to tackle the disease.
But more powerful drugs usually mean more serious side effects. So there comes a point when increasing the dosage of the drug any further simply isn’t possible due to the damage that powerful cancer drugs can do to the body in large amounts.
So Dr Mark Middleton and his team, based at Cancer Research UK’s Experimental Cancer Medicine Centre (ECMC) in Oxford, have discovered a possible way around this challenging problem through the development of a new, more targeted cancer therapy. Their results are published this week in the journal Science Translational Medicine.
