In the developed world, cancer will affect one in three people at some stage in their life. Many of us have already been touched by the disease, in one way or another. However, you would be wrong to think that progress is not being made.
Without research we are condemning tomorrow's generation to today's treatments. That is why it is vitally important that AICR's funding of cutting edge projects continues - so that new treatments can be developed for the next generation. Here are some of the success stories our donors' money has funded:
Putting Cancer Cells in a Permanent "Coma"
Current treatments are based on cutting out or killing cancer cells. Now scientists based at the Marie Curie Research Institute, in England, believe the work could lead to a third way of dealing with them. They have successfully put cancer cells into a permanent "coma" by reactivating a natural self-defence mechanism which responds to dangerous mutations by putting the cell into a state called "senescence" meaning that it cannot divide any more. More>>>
How Cancer Cells Start to Spread
University of Manchester researchers have discovered a key process that may be involved in the spread of cancer by studying the growth of human embryonic stem cells. Supported by an AICR grant, Dr Chris Ward and his team used these cells to investigate how tumour cells are able to migrate to other parts of the body, where they can form secondary tumours. They studied a crucial biochemical change that makes cancer cells able to start moving and spread into other tissues. More>>>
How Advanced Prostate Cancer Cells Grow
Research support by AICR at Queen’s University Belfast has discovered important new information about advanced prostate cancer and revealed new opportunities into how it could be treated.
In early stages of prostate cancer, the cells require androgens - the male sex hormones – to grow and multiply. Our main drug treatments for this cancer work by blocking the activity of these hormones, thus preventing the tumour from growing. However, most prostate cancers eventually become ‘androgen-independent’, meaning that the cells become able to multiply in the absence of these androgens so the drugs no longer stop the tumour growing. More>>>
New Colon Cancer Marker Discovered
Research supported by AICR has led to the discovery of a marker which could help diagnose colon cancer more accurately. Predicting which colon cancers were likely to spread would mean that patients could be given chemotherapy to improve their chance of a cure.
Professor Chris Hutchison of Durham University and his team, in collaboration with researchers at Maastricht University in the Netherlands, studied the tissue samples from 700 bowel cancer patients for the presence of the protein Lamin A. They found that most of the samples that had Lamin A were from patients who had died of the cancer, because it had spread around their bodies. Next, they studied colon cancer cells grown in the laboratory. When these cells were made to produce Lamin A, they moved around more and spread faster. More>>>
