Category Archives: Family history

Twenty-five years since landmark bowel cancer discovery

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Professor Sir Walter Bodmer

Professor Sir Walter Bodmer who helped locate the APC gene 25 years ago.

There’s a lot more to do before we can say we’ve beaten cancer, but every now and then, it’s good to sit back and reflect on how far we’ve already come.

Back in June, when the country was celebrating the Diamond Jubilee, we took time to think about how much cancer research has changed since the Queen came to the throne.

And this month, we’re proud to look back at one of our key achievements, which has played a big role in the lives of the one in twenty patients who’s bowel cancer is inherited.

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Bowel cancer – 40 years of progress but early detection is key

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Spotting cancer early can save lives. Over the last nine weeks, the Department of Health has been running a campaign called ‘Be Clear on Cancer’, aimed at raising awareness of bowel cancer symptoms.

The campaign ended over the weekend, but keeping the focus on the disease, today marks the start of Bowel Cancer Awareness Month.

So we thought it would be a good idea to look at how things have changed for bowel cancer patients over the years, and how continued research has lead to a falling mortality rate.

In the graphic below, you can see how this improvement has been driven by research on bowel cancer, both by our own researchers and by scientists around the world. And you can scroll down to read about this research in more detail.

A detailed infographic about bowel cancer

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Tracking down the BRCA genes (Part 2)

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

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.

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The Pill, pregnancy and cancer – making sense of the headlines

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Are all ‘side effects’ bad for your health? In the case of the birth control Pill, it seems not.

Today, a study that we helped fund has confirmed that the combined Pill isn’t just an effective contraceptive, but that it also gives women long-lasting protection against ovarian cancer. Women who took the Pill for any length of time had a 14 per cent lower risk of ovarian cancer than those who never took it.

And women in the study who’d taken the Pill for 10 years were almost half as likely to develop ovarian cancer compared with women who’d taken it for less than 1 year. The below graphic shows how many women this equated to:

The study has been widely covered in the media, and these headline statistics are likely to be reassuring for the many thousands of women who take the Pill in the UK and across the world.

And women who have had kids also have reason to be positive – the study also confirmed that they have a reduced risk of ovarian cancer. Women in the study who’d been pregnant had their risk of ovarian cancer reduced by almost one-third (29 per cent), compared with women who hadn’t.

But what should an ‘average’ woman conclude from these numbers? Can any explicit advice be given based on the evidence? Continue reading →

Shutting down cells’ ‘back-up generator’ to beat kidney cancer

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A generator

Targeting cancer's back-up generator could help treat the disease

As well as the ingenuity, dedication and skill of their staff, modern hospitals can’t function properly without a reliable electricity supply. This is so critical that hospitals have a back-up generator to keep their life-saving systems working in an emergency..

In a similar way, our cells also have their own emergency back-up systems. Thanks to years of painstaking research, we now know that our cells have evolved multiple sets of similar internal machinery to carry out key processes like repairing DNA, generating energy, and sensing signals from the outside world.

This redundancy may seem wasteful, but it’s actually extremely important – it’s the key to life’s adaptability, allowing cells to take repeated knocks and yet still keep ticking over in changing and challenging circumstances.

But these vital fail-safe mechanisms come with a heavy price. As well as keeping healthy cells going during hard times, they also provide cancers with a path to invincibility. Tumour cells exploit these ‘back-up’ systems, becoming grossly abnormal while still carrying on dividing, shrugging off even the harshest of cancer treatments.

Thankfully, researchers are discovering how to target cancer cells that have become dependent on their reserve systems. This concept – dubbed ‘synthetic lethality’ – is a hot topic in the search for better cancer treatments. The term may sound familiar to regular blog readers as we’ve written about it several times before

This week, researchers at our Beatson Institute in Glasgow – working in collaboration with scientists in the US, Israel and Australia – have published a paper in the journal Nature  that could lead to new ways to treat kidney cancer, a disease that seldom gets much publicity despite affecting nearly 9,000 people a year in the UK.

Let’s take a look at the new study, and how it fits into an emerging success story in cancer research.

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New ovarian cancer gene is a significant step forward

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Today, Cancer Research UK-funded scientists led by Professor Nazneen Rahman at The Institute of Cancer Research announced a major step forward in our understanding of the genetic faults that underpin some cases of ovarian cancer.

Publishing their results in the prestigious journal Nature Genetics, the team revealed that women who inherit a faulty version of the RAD51D gene have a one in 11 chance of developing ovarian cancer, compared with one in 70 for the general population.

Although hereditary faults in RAD51D are thought to account for less than one in every hundred ovarian cancer cases – fewer than 60 women every year in the UK – this discovery could prove very important for helping to prevent or treat the disease in women who carry the faulty gene.

Ovarian cancer infographic small

Click for larger version

Let’s take a closer look at what the scientists did, and what it means for our understanding of ovarian cancer.

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Understanding triple negative breast cancer – 53BP1 and the BRCA1 connection

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BRCA1 protein

BRCA1 is faulty in many hereditary breast cancers

Over the years, Cancer Research UK has helped transform breast cancer treatment – now 8 out of 10 women survive their disease for more than 5 years, compared with 5 out of 10 women in the 1970s.

Most of this progress has been made in so-called hormone-sensitive cancers – those that are fuelled by the hormones oestrogen or progesterone.  These tumours tend to respond well to hormone-blocking drugs such as tamoxifen. And the drug trastuzumab (Herceptin) can be very effective for women whose cancers produce large amounts of a molecule called HER-2.

But there is a significant group of breast cancers that lurk in the shadow of this success. Around 15 out of every hundred cases are “triple negative” tumours –  they don’t respond to hormone treatment, and they don’t have high HER-2 levels. This leaves limited options for treatment.

Writing in the journal Nature Structural and Molecular Biology this week, Cancer Research UK-funded scientists in Oxford, and their international colleagues, have made an important discovery that could help doctors decide how best to treat women with triple negative breast cancer. And their findings also shed light on tumours caused by inherited faults in the BRCA1 gene.

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