The good news about cancer…
News feature: July 2006Around half of all cancers could be prevented through changes in lifestyle – 135,000 cases a year in the UK alone. Death rates have dropped by 11% for most of the common types of cancer over the last decade. And most of this is thanks to cancer researchers and their unprecedented advances in understanding the molecular and cellular basis of cancer.
The University of Manchester has a distinguished history in the field and is about to become a world leader in the exploration and treatment of cancer, offering real hope of even more advances in diagnoses and treatments in the future.
Manchester Cancer Research Centre
Links between fundamental scientific discovery, clinical research and improved patient outcomes are now vital to enable further progress, and the University has recently established the Manchester Cancer Research Centre (MCRC), bringing together scientists and researchers from The University of Manchester, the Paterson Institute of Cancer Research, the Christie Hospital and Cancer Research UK.The Centre aims to double cancer research activity and increase funding from £30m to £60m per year. This will not only build on the partners’ internationally renowned strengths, it will also allow strategic development of their work to have an even greater impact on cancer research.
Multidisciplinary resesarch
The focus will be multidisciplinary with academics based across the research spectrum, from basic science to clinical work. They will seek a better understanding of the events that cause, develop and maintain cancer while identifying new targets for possible intervention.Extensive early phase trials of new agents enhanced by technology such as molecular imaging will also be carried out at the centre. Research programmes will include existing work on breast cancer; paediatric cancer; cell proliferations, death and genome stability; experimental cancer therapeutics; and tumour microenvironment. In each of the areas the MCRC aims to be a world leader.
Investment
Fulfilling these ambitions will require considerable investment over the next five years in scientific researchers (to include ten world-class researchers), new laboratories, clinical research facilities and supporting technology.Director Nic Jones said the establishment of the centre had come at the most opportune time. “By coordinating our research activities and emphasising the need to bridge the gap between research and patient treatment, we can become a major international centre of cancer research,” he said. “This research will lead to safer and better treatments for the future.”
Teenage and young adult cancer
Complementing the launch of the MCRC is the appointment of Tim Eden as the UK's first Professor of Teenage and Young Adult Cancer. The disease affects over 2,200 teenagers every year and the number is increasing. Improvements in survival rates have been much poorer than in children and many older adults in the last 20 years, and the number of patients entered into clinical trials is also much lower. This lack of research means very little is known about why teenagers get cancer.The charity Teenage Cancer Trust has invested £2.5m over ten years to fund Professor Eden and his team, based across The University of Manchester, the Christie Hospital and Central Manchester and Manchester Children's University Hospitals NHS Trust.
Among those who welcomed the appointment was Professor Mike Richards, the UK government’s National Cancer Director, who said: “The establishment of a dedicated research team in Manchester will stimulate much-needed research into cancers affecting adolescents.”
Engineered T-cell therapy
Another recent development is the award of a major EU grant to Professor Robert Hawkins for his work to develop cancer-fighting cells from within the body’s own immune system. The pre-clinical research project, which has been awarded nearly €12m, has the potential to fight a broad range of cancers.T-cells are part of the body’s immune defence machinery which naturally protects against infections and some cancers and can be used to treat some malignant disease. But many cancers avoid destruction by the immune system. The project team, involving an international consortium of 16 partners, hopes that state-of-the-art technologies can be used to modify the T-cells, to hunt down and destroy cancer tumours.
Professor Hawkins, Cancer Research UK Professor of Medical Oncology at the University, said: “Unlike radiotherapy and chemotherapy, which destroy both cancerous and healthy cells, engineered T-cell therapy has the potential to selectively destroy cancers within a patient’s body using its own infection-fighting mechanisms. This project focuses on optimising that system in the laboratory.”
Cancer research across the University
Other work is being carried out in the Faculty of Life Sciences, where scientists are trying to understand the basic biological mechanisms underlying cancer development. One group of researchers for instance is trying to understand how cells interact with their local environment and how this then regulates their decisions to live, die, stay put or migrate. These studies are particularly important in the understanding of how breast cancers evolve and spread.Several other groups are deciphering the mechanisms that determine if and when cells should grow and divide. A third group is studying the mechanisms that maintain genome stability in normal cells and how these mechanisms go wrong during tumour evolution. Since the vast majority of human cancers have highly abnormal genomes, this area has implications for understanding many different tumours.
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