Ovarian Cancer - Cancer Research UK

Building an artificial tumour in the lab

Posted on May 16, 2013 by Oliver Childs

Fran Balkwill plans to build the world’s first artificial tumour

In 2000, a team of archaeologists in the ancient Egyptian city of Thebes uncovered the mummified remains of a young woman called Tabaketenmut. The big toe of her right foot was missing. In its place was a wood and leather contraption tied to the limb with string, which researchers believe to be the earliest example of a prosthetic body part.

This rudimentary device – developed more than 2,000 years ago to help a woman walk – is often cited as one of the first and most primitive examples of bioengineering, the use of artificial components to replace damaged or absent parts of the body.

Today the term has a much broader meaning and includes disciplines such as materials science, biology, mathematics, engineering and computing. And we’ve come an incredibly long way since – thanks to primitive bioengineering – Tabaketenmut walked the earth.

Just last month, we heard the astonishing news that scientists have been able to grow a functioning kidney in the lab. And researchers in the US have developed a high-tech ‘lung on a chip’ to help them study infections and other diseases.

Now Cancer Research UK scientist Professor Fran Balkwill is looking to make a similarly monumental step forward in cancer biology by bioengineering the first ever three-dimensional artificial tumour.

She hopes the work will underpin the development of new treatments that attack the interactions between cancer cells and healthy tissues that unwittingly support them, known as the microenvironment.

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Watching cancers evolve using ‘liquid biopsies’

Posted on April 8, 2013 by Henry Scowcroft

Cancer’s evolving DNA can be detected using a blood test

Sometimes it feels like cancer research is progressing at a dizzying speed.

Just last year, we reported how Cancer Research UK scientists had reconstructed the evolution of a patient’s kidney tumour during treatment – one of many studies over the past few years illustrating cancer’s fearsome genetic complexity and adaptability.

This phenomenon, known as ‘intratumour heterogeneity’, led many to predict a long, hard slog to fully understand it – let alone get a handle on its implications for treatment.

One key concern was that patients would need to undergo a series of small operations (biopsies) to take repeated tissue samples to track how their cancer develops – and that this could be painful, costly and risky – especially for cancers deep in the body. And even then, because of the genetic variation within each patient’s cancer, there would be no guarantee that the biopsy results would represent an accurate picture.

Others also pointed out that such heterogeneity was a blow to the optimism around new-generation ‘targeted’ therapies, designed to treat cancer cells driven by individual mutations.

But recent discoveries have renewed this optimism. It turns out that tumours release DNA into the bloodstream, and that this seems to contain signals about what’s going on inside it. Consequently, there’s been a growing hope that analysing these DNA fingerprints could provide a quick, simple ‘liquid biopsy’ to track tumours’ progress.

And last month, researchers at our Cambridge Institute published compelling evidence that circulating DNA could indeed be used to take a snapshot of the DNA errors (mutations) in a patient’s breast cancer.

Today they’ve gone one step further proving, in a beautifully detailed paper in the journal Nature, that blood samples can be used to monitor genetic changes in a patient’s disease over time.

This has the potential to be a game-changer, and rapidly accelerate research into what makes cancers tick, in real patients, in timeframes that can impact on clinical decision making.

Let’s look at what they found.

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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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Treating late-stage ovarian cancer – why does the UK do so badly?

Posted on October 3, 2012 by Henry Scowcroft

On average, 19 women are diagnosed with ovarian cancer every day in the UK

One of the most important facts about cancer, which seems so obvious that repeating it again is almost banal, is that the earlier cancer is detected, the better.

Another frequently repeated ‘cancer fact’ is that UK patients tend to do worse than patients in some other developed countries.

As we’ve discussed in the past, the UK’s ‘sick man’ status in Europe is a bit of an oversimplification, and actually appears to be improving thanks to the attention successive governments have given to cancer care.

Nevertheless, study after study has highlighted the fact that the UK’s survival rates lag behind other countries. But the exact cause, or causes, of these differences has been the subject of much debate and controversy.

Is it, as some suspect, due to later diagnosis in the UK? Or is the quality of care not as good as in other countries? Do patients lack access to the latest or most appropriate forms of treatment? Are our patients generally less well, and unfit for treatments that can, for some patients, be aggressive? Or is there something biologically different about cancers among Brits that makes them harder to treat?

Answering these questions is the key to fixing the problem – and it’s likely that it’s a complex mixture of several, or all, of these factors, to a greater or lesser degree. And over recent years, much has been made of the fact that generally we need to up our national game in terms of spotting cancers earlier – something that’s hard to disagree with.

But alongside this, an international project – funded by the Department of Health and spearheaded by Cancer Research UK – has been trying to untangle the cause of the differences in national cancer survival rates.

Today this effort – known as the International Cancer Benchmarking Partnership, or ICBP – has published a detailed, in-depth comparison of survival rates for women whose ovarian cancer is diagnosed at different stages, across five countries – Australia, Norway, Canada, Denmark and the UK.

The results are both good and bad news for UK patients.

The surprising and reassuring news is that we’re as good as the other countries at spotting ovarian cancer early, and women diagnosed early don’t fare significantly worse than in other countries.

In other words, the UK’s poorer ovarian cancer survival rate, compared to other countries, isn’t because of a failure to spot the disease early.

The bad news: when the disease is spotted late, the UK seems to be worse at managing these patients than other countries, and our survival rates are lower.

And it looks as if this might be one of the main reasons why, overall, our survival stats look worse than other countries.

Let’s look at what the study found in a bit more detail, and the issues it raises.

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Cancer death rates continue to fall

Posted on September 25, 2012 by Henry Scowcroft

Today our stats team has published new data, forecasting that the proportion of people who die from cancer will continue to fall over the next 18 years.

Rather than penning another 1,000 word treatise on the matter, we thought we’d try something a bit different: presenting the results as an animated video:

(Here’s a transcript for anyone who can’t watch the video – there are some graphs further down the page too).

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Could a blood test reveal cancer’s genetic secrets?

Posted on May 30, 2012 by Kat Arney

A simple blood test might one day help doctors monitor the genetic changes in cancer in ‘real time’

Over recent months we’ve written about exciting new research looking at how the genetic makeup of an individual patient’s cancer shifts and evolves as the disease develops and spreads.

At the moment the only way to monitor this is to take a sample of a tumour (called a biopsy) and test it in the lab. But this approach isn’t perfect – for a start, a doctor needs to be able to reach a tumour in order to take a biopsy, which often has to be done surgically. And monitoring the disease over time means repeated biopsies, which may need to be taken from multiple places if the cancer has spread.

Wouldn’t it be fantastic if there was a simple blood test that could reveal the genetic fingerprints of a tumour, no matter where it’s located in the body?

This solution may be closer than you think. Although it’s still at an early stage and needs more work, scientists at our Cambridge Research Institute have developed a blood test that can detect genetic mutations in tiny fragments of DNA shed into the bloodstream by dying cancer cells. And it has the potential to be a game-changer for the way the disease is monitored and treated – and maybe even diagnosed – in the future.

Here’s a short video of study leaders Dr Nitzan Rosenfeld and Dr James Brenton, explaining more about their exciting research and what it might mean for cancer patients in the future.

The Cambridge team has just published their results in the journal Science Translational Medicine, so let’s look in a bit more detail about how the test works and where this research might take us in the future.

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Tracking down the BRCA genes (Part 2)

Posted on February 29, 2012 by Kat Arney

This entry is part 9 of 12 in our High-impact science series

Professor Mike Stratton led the team that tracked down BRCA2

In part one, we told the story of Cancer Research UK’s involvement in the race to identify BRCA1 – the first known breast cancer gene.

Although this was a very important discovery, it wasn’t the end of the story. Along the way, researchers had discovered evidence suggesting that there had to be at least one more gene out there.

Here we look at how our scientists revealed the identity of the second breast cancer gene, BRCA2, and what the discovery of both these genes means for cancer patients and their families.