News – bowel cancer chaos, breast cancer stats, citizen science and more

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  • UK newspapers

    Its time for our weekly news digest

    This week’s big science story comes from our London Research Institute, where researchers have found a molecular mechanism that causes extreme chromosomal chaos in bowel cancer. The BBC had this take, while we took a look at the science behind the headlines.

  • We’re really excited about this – our ‘citizen science’ projects to harness the power of the public to beat cancer. We showed our results so far to MPs (blog), and – as you’re reading this – a crack team of experts is holed up at Google’s HQ working on the sequel. More about how it all works here.
  • There was a lot in the news about breast cancer this week. Perhaps the most widely covered story was from the US, where a study found increased rates of advanced disease among the country’s younger women. The cause is unclear (there’s a nice Q&A here), and we’re not sure whether the same thing’s happening in the UK. The Daily Mail covered the story (but omitted to point out that the findings only apply to the US). The pick of the coverage was this, from the New York Times.
  • This is fascinating. US researchers find evidence that more women could benefit from Herceptin (although, obviously, their findings need confirmation in clinical trials).
  • Russia’s President, Vladimir Putin, has signed tough new laws to stop people smoking in public places, says the BBC.
  • A timely reminder about the benefits of quitting smoking: as well as lowering your risk of cancer, it lowers the risk of heart attacks and strokes by a substantial amount, according to German research reported in the Daily Mail
  • “The additional risk is quite small and probably hidden by the noise of other cancer risks like people’s lifestyle choices,” said one of the authors of a report on cancer risks after the Fukushima nuclear disaster in Japan. Despite this, The Guardian picked the report’s biggest number (70 per cent), and came up with this rather alarmist account. A much more balanced take was provided by the Wall Street Journal, and the BBC.
  • Here’s an excellent article about how improved understanding of cancer’s biology is leading to faster trials and better cancer drugs.
  • This Telegraph headline claiming oily fish ’could help protect against skin cancer’ has exaggerated the findings of a small study that looked omega-3 supplements. The study actually looked at the skin’s reaction to light and the immune response that follows this, and didn’t directly measure the effect of supplements on skin cancer risk. Our advice remains the same.

And finally…

*more research is needed.

See you next week.

Henry

Breast cancer in the UK: can we do even better?

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Mammogram on screen

UK breast cancer survival is worse than in comparable countries – why?

In the UK we’re making great progress against breast cancer – over 85 per cent of women diagnosed with the disease survive for at least five years. And around two thirds of all women diagnosed with breast cancer can expect to survive their disease for at least 20 years.

But today’s results from the International Cancer Benchmarking Partnership (ICBP) – a study of cancer survival rates in some of the worlds’ richest countries – serve as a reminder that we could be doing even better, and it gives some clues about how.

It’s the latest in a string of important papers from ICBP. The first showed that while UK survival is improving, it lags behind the best in the world. And for the four cancers studied in ICBP, it is only in breast cancer that are we closing the gap.

Two recent papers examined the reasons for the UK’s relatively poor ovarian and lung cancer survival. They suggested that the differences between countries – and the UK’s poorer statistics – were caused more by differences in access to treatment than by being diagnosed at a late stage.

The new research, which drew on data from more than 250,000 breast cancer patients, paints a similar picture. It shows that survival rates for women diagnosed in the UK are lower than those in Australia, Canada, Norway, Denmark or Sweden – with 87 per cent of women survived their disease for at least three years after diagnosis (known as ‘three-year survival’) compared with 94 per cent in Canada (the highest in the study).

Although the overall differences between the countries weren’t that large – women with breast cancer generally fare well across all the countries studied – a closer look at the numbers reveals some good and some bad news.

This is possible because, like the lung and ovarian cancer studies, the new analysis also looked at the proportion of breast cancers diagnosed at different stages of the disease, and tallied this against the chances of surviving at each of these stages. This yields important clues about the root causes of the UK’s poorer breast cancer survival. Let’s have a look at the details.

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Can the power of the public help personalise cancer treatment?

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A mobile phone

This time we’re going mobile

Tonight, leading technology experts, hackers and scientists will gather in London to get ready for a weekend with a difference – Cancer Research UK’s GameJam event. Over the next 48 hours, forty ‘hackers’ will be embedding raw anonymised gene data into a new computer game, with a working title of GeneRun.

When members of the public (aka ‘citizen scientists’) play this game, they’ll be analysing this data, and speeding up our research in the process.

The event follows the success of Cell Slider™ – an interactive website developed following a hackathon event in May 2012, which allows the public to become amateur pathologists and help speed up the analysis of our archive tumour samples.

This time, we’re going mobile – so we’re teaming up with technology titans such as Amazon Web Services, Facebook and Google to turn our gene data into an app or game that citizens can enjoy playing while on the move.

But what exactly is this data, and why do we need the power of the public to analyse it?

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MPs have a go at ‘citizen science’

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Shabana Mahmood MP

MPs were fascinated by CellSliderTM

We’ve been talking about our new ‘citizen science’ work a fair bit recently on this blog.

But it’s important to make sure that MPs are up to date with our latest projects. So yesterday we went to Parliament to tell them about it… and they loved it – after all, who wouldn’t want to “help beat cancer in five minutes?”

To recap briefly, last year, we launched Cell SliderTM, a citizen science project to help accelerate our groundbreaking research.

Taking just a few minutes and a few clicks of the mouse, Cell SliderTM is the first ever interactive website to turn real archive cancer data into a format that can be analysed by the public.

It presents real images of tumour samples in the form of a simple game of snap. Users are guided through a tutorial explaining which cells to analyse and which ones to ignore. By getting the public (yes, that includes politicians) to become ‘citizen scientists’, more samples will be analysed faster and more effectively, freeing up Cancer Research UK’s experts to carry out other cancer research.

To date, more than 650,000 images have already been analysed.

We asked MPs to have a go on cellslider.net and then urge their local communities to take part too. Here are a few photos, and some of their Tweets from the event:

  • Dr Julian Huppert, Liberal Democrat MP for Cambridge and a former research scientist

  • Shabana Mahmood, Shadow Minister for Universities and Science and Labour MP for Birmingham Ladywood

  • Nick de Bois, member of the All Party Parliamentary Group on Cancer and Conservative MP for Enfield North

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It was great to see some of Parliament’s cancer champions taking part, including John Baron MP, Chair of the All Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) on Cancer; shadow health minister Andrew Gwynne MP; James Arbuthnot MP, Chair of the APPG on Brain Tumours, Sir Bob Russell MP from the APPG on Smoking and Health, and Jim Shannon MP, the Democratic Unionist Party health spokesman.

We’re so pleased to have the support of MPs in raising awareness, as there’s still so much more we need to do to ensure no-one’s life is cut short by cancer.

By boosting our ability to analyse data quickly with the help of ‘citizen scientists’ – and by encouraging MPs to shout about it – our world-class research teams will be able to develop better ways to prevent, control and cure the disease and help save many more lives.

We’ll be doing some more exciting citizen science activities over the coming weeks and months so watch out for more info!

Laura

  • Laura Williams is a senior public affairs manager at Cancer Research UK

Order from chaos – making sense of bowel cancer’s scrambled DNA

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Chromosomal instability in bowel cancer

Unstable chromosomes can make bowel cancer worse

Last year, researchers at our London Research Institute published what became – after the discovery of the Higgs boson – the second most-referenced science paper of 2012

Their study looked at how tumours ‘evolve’ during treatment, and showed that, genetically speaking, different parts of a patient’s kidney tumour were extremely diverse. No two regions they analysed were identical.

Although not the first study to demonstrate this diversity – known as ‘intratumoral heterogeneity’ –   this paper kick-started a wider discussion of its causes and implications. Understanding how diversity develops in a tumour is important – because this is how cancers develop resistance to chemotherapy, and ultimately what makes cancer such a killer.

Today, the same group has published new research in the journal Nature that starts to reveal diversity’s origins.

They’ve been studying a phenomenon called ‘chromosomal instability’ in bowel cancer cells, where cells’ DNA becomes more and more disordered as they grow and divide, causing ever-greater genetic chaos. Patients with more unstable tumours tend to do worse - so understanding how it develops is important.

In a series of meticulous and detailed experiments, the researchers have found compelling evidence that chromosomal instability is caused by the malfunctioning of a particular (and unexpected) step in cell division, and identified three genes involved.

This gives us a better understanding of instability’s causes, which hopefully will galvanise future work to exploit it, and ultimately to improve things for patients. Let’s look in detail at what they did.

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Introducing our latest arsenal in the fight against cancer

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A scientist in the lab

Our committee has invested £23million in new research

Thanks to the generosity of our supporters, we’re able to spend hundreds of millions of pounds every year on life-saving cancer research.

And our highly experienced Science Committee makes sure this money goes to fund the most creative, promising and innovative research in the UK.

The committee recently met to decide which pioneering new research projects have what it takes to lead the fight against cancer.

After careful consideration the committee chose to spend over £23million in world class research across a spectrum of work – from screening to trials and cancer biology.

Here are some of the highlights.

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News digest – galaxies and tumours, childhood cancer trials, doctor delays, and more

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The latest cancer news

The latest cancer news

  • The number one reason people say they might delay seeing their GP is difficulty making an appointment. Our press release has more info and the story was widely covered in regional media, and in The Independent.
  • Could star-gazing help in the fight against cancer? Cancer Research UK scientists and astronomers teamed up this week to do just that. The Daily Mail and the BBC both covered the work, and we blogged about it and our pioneering CellSlider project – the first ever public cancer research endeavour that you can do from the comfort of your own home.
  • Sticking with high-tech partnerships, IBM has announced that its supercomputer, ‘Watson’ – famous for winning US TV gameshow Jeapordy! – is being drafted in to service against cancer in the States. Find out more at Wired.

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