It's time for our weekly news digest
It was a week that started in Scotland, with the ‘no’ decision on prostate drug abiraterone, and went on to cover skin cancer, No Smoking Day, oral cancer, shisha pipes, prostate screening and cancer-munching blood cells.
In short, it was another hectic week in the world of cancer news.
Here’s our weekly round-up. We’re sticking with the Storify format for now, but please do keep sending us your comments and feedback…
Vemurafenib is taken in pill form
In 2002, a paper appeared in top science journal, Nature, called “Mutations of the BRAF gene in human cancer”.
It described how scientists at The Institute of Cancer Research and the Wellcome Trust Sanger Centre had made a breakthrough.
They’d discovered that a gene called BRAF was faulty in about seven out of 10 cases of melanoma – the most serious form of skin cancer.
The researchers had also isolated a particular fault in the gene, which they dubbed V600E, which was responsible for about five out of 10 melanoma cases.
We’re extremely proud to have helped support this work, which you can read more about in Kat’s post from a couple of years ago. And over the years we helped support research to map out how this gene causes cancer, and how it might be targeted with drugs.
Today, a decade later, pharmaceutical giants Roche have launched a new drug called vemurafenib, or Zelboraf, in the UK. Building on the fundamental work of our researchers, the drug targets melanomas caused by the BRAF V600E mutation.
We’ve tracked vemurafenib’s development on this blog, from its early days as a chemical called PLX4032 to the excitement it generated at last years’ ASCO cancer conference in the US.
But while it’s always great to see new drugs emerge – particularly for conditions like advanced melanoma, which has seen little progress for decades – we need to temper this excitement with a few caveats.
Diagnosing cancer early saves lives
If cancer is diagnosed early, it’s nearly always easier to treat successfully. But too many cancers are still diagnosed at a late stage – thousands of lives could be saved in the UK if more cancers were spotted early.
We’re working hard to solve this problem, and we’re excited to announce a major new partnership with Tesco. By working together we will find ways to close the gap between survival rates in the UK and the best countries in Europe so that thousands more will survive cancer in the future.
Tesco will raise £10 million to fund 32 early diagnosis research projects across the UK, as well as displaying our leaflets on the signs and symptoms of cancer to the millions of customers who go through their stores’ checkouts each week.
But what exactly will this research involve? Read on for just a few highlights of the work that this valuable partnership is supporting. Continue reading
Read the latest cancer research news
Here are the cancer stories that caught our eye this week. Click on links to read more in-depth coverage. Think we missed anything? Let us know in the comments below.
Hot off the press... our news digest
There’s been another glut of fascinating stories this week, most of which focused on aspects of the NHS. Here’s our digest – follow the links for the full story:
Cancer research is constantly moving forward – we’ve already spotted several interesting stories for the week ahead, so keep your eyes peeled, and see you next week.
Henry
Genetic data is being used to help doctors decide treatments
When breast cancer drug trastuzumab (Herceptin) became available to the NHS in 2006, many hospital pathology labs were caught on the hop.
Trastuzumab is designed to treat women whose tumours contain high levels of a protein called Her2, but having to routinely, reliably and accurately test a tumour’s Her2 levels, as part of ‘business-as-usual’, was uncharted territory for many pathologists.
As we’re starting to see, drugs like trastuzumab, which only work in a particular group of patients, are very much part of the future of cancer medicine. But as they begin to emerge from clinical trials, the NHS needs to be properly equipped to carry out the lab tests that tell doctors who will benefit and who won’t.
If lab and hospitals gradually set up these services themselves, it could lead to duplication of effort, or variations in service for patients. So Cancer Research UK felt that it would be better to try to jump-start the process and make sure that the NHS is ready for this new era of ‘stratified’ medicine. In June 2010 we announced that we were putting together a partnership to try to make this happen. Today, just 18 months later, the programme is up and running and recruiting its first patients.
To coincide with this exciting announcement, we thought we’d lift the lid on the programme and look at the details of how it will work.
Sunburn is a sign of DNA damage that can lead to skin cancer
Earlier this week, new research was published about the effects of the body’s daily rhythms – known as the ‘circadian clock’ – on how skin responds to damage caused by UV exposure.
It’s an interesting piece of research, carried out in mice, but it by no means justifies the headlines it generated, some of which suggest that the findings are applicable to humans. This isn’t just incorrect, but could actually be harmful.
This isn’t to say that there’s no link between our body clocks and cancer. Our own researchers are investigating this, and are making big strides in this field.
But the way the new research, from a team in the US, has been communicated is concerning. Let’s have a look at what they actually found.
