Professor Fran Balkwill
No man is an island – we exist together with other people in families, communities and societies. The same is true of cancer cells – they need a host of non-cancerous cells, collectively known as the tumour microenvironment, to help them grow and develop.
In the latest of our Expert Opinion interviews we talk with Professor Fran Balkwill, who argues that treating the tumour and its microenvironment together represents an exciting frontier for cancer treatment.
As well as the talks themselves, there’s been a fair amount of media coverage from the 2011 NCRI Cancer Conference.
The BT convention centre - site of the NCRI conference
Tuesday saw stories about improved waiting times for cancer, covered by the BBC, the Scotsman and by the Daily Mail, and about how doctors could help inform patients about obesity, which appeared on Sky News, and in the Scotsman, the Herald and the Mirror.
Wednesday morning also saw widespread coverage of research showing that bowel cancer screening was reducing deaths from the disease.
These were based on new research presented at the conference, but there were loads of other sessions too – here’s our Tuesday round-up, whch covers cancer biology, the tumour ‘microenvironment’, radiotherapy, and the Chernobyl nuclear disaster…
Professor Henning Walczak and his team have made an important discovery about inflammation.
It’s taken six years, the development of a new experimental technique and a move from Germany to London, but an international team of scientists, including some funded by Cancer Research UK, have finally uncovered a vital piece in the scientific puzzle that links inflammation to diseases such as cancer and arthritis.
Publishing their results in Nature this week, Professor Henning Walczak‘s team at Imperial College London describe how a protein called Sharpin helps to switch between ‘good’ signals in cells – which are important for responding to disease – and ‘bad’ signals, which lead to inflammation and cell death.
Here’s a short audio clip of Professor Walczak discussing his new research – and below that, our in-depth analysis of what the researchers found:
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As we’ve mentioned before, there’s a stack of evidence that chronic inflammation – directed by white blood cells – plays a role in the development and spread of some types of cancer.
For a start, plenty of molecular studies have found that the chemicals involved in controlling inflammation also seem to be involved in cancer.
Secondly, population studies have linked conditions like Crohn’s disease, asbestosis, H. pylori infection, and hepatitis all have a link to cancer. In addition, people who regularly take anti-inflammatory drugs like aspirin have a reduced risk of the disease.
And crucially in this story, studies of cancer samples have revealed that tumours are studded with white blood cells that are known to be involved in inflammation. It now seems that the more white cells there are in a patient’s tumour, the more likely the cancer is to spread, and the worse the patient’s outlook.
But white blood cells are supposed to be the good guys – the body’s policemen. Could they also be aiding and abetting cancer spread? To try to find out, US researcher Professor Lisa Coussens has been studying the role of white blood cells in cancer for over a decade.
Her lab at the University of California, San Francisco, have found that certain specific types of white blood cell seem to shift from playing ‘good cop’ to playing ‘bad cop’ inside tumours, helping cancer cells escape like a corrupt sheriff might let a killer out of jail.
Well, last week, a few more of those caveats fell away, and the picture became just a little bit clearer.
Scientists in the US have, for the first time, demonstrated that chronic inflammation leads to pre-cancerous problems, DNA damage and, ultimately, bowel and stomach cancer, amongst mice who have been bred to have sluggish ‘DNA repair mechanisms’.
This is a really important finding. Continue reading
