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.......if there is no investment in research today, tomorrow's cancer sufferers will be condemned to today's treatments. |  |
Norman Barrett, Chief Executive, AICR.
Each of the projects we are funding is examining a crucial aspect of cancer, its processes and causes. Here is a flavour of some of the work currently being carried out.
- At Kings College in London AICR is supporting the research of Professor Hannah Gould, a world expert on IgE antibodies. The immune system uses many other types of antibodies which are very effective at attacking smaller things such as viruses and toxins. However, when these antibodies have been used to attack cancer cells, they have not been effective.
- A new approach to tackling breast cancer is being investigated by Dr Abelardo Lopez-Rivas and his colleagues at the Institute of Parasitology and Biomedicine at Granada in Spain. AICR has recently awarded him a three-year grant to investigate the possibility of using a natural chemical messenger which can instruct breast cancer cells to kill themselves.
- At St George's Hospital Medical School in London, AICR has been funding a research project aimed at unravelling one of the control pathways that appears to play an important role in the mechanism of skin cancer. Dr Sue Cotterill has been studying a protein called TTC4 which was originally discovered in the fruit fly. The internal pathways of proteins and genes that control cell behaviour are basically the same in all living animals, so a new pathway can be discovered in a very simple animal, like an insect, and very often the same pathway will be found in human cells.
- AICR is funding a research project at the University of Giessen in Germany that is searching for a new way to treat advanced prostate cancer. Dr Aria Baniahmad is basing his research on a recent finding about a molecule called the Androgen Receptor.
