£5million boost for cancer studies
NEWCASTLE UNIVERSITY’S VITAL CANCER WORK GETS AWARD
A MULTI-MILLION pound award will give a boost to groundbreaking cancer research in Newcastle.
Cancer Research UK has handed £5m in funding to three cancer studies at Northern Institute for Cancer Research (NICR) which will give hope to both child cancer patients, and people suffering from liver cancer.
Professor Josef Vormoor is one of the researchers who will benefit from the latest cash injection.
Originally from Germany, Prof Vormoor joined Newcastle University 11 years ago and is now director of the Northern Institute for Cancer Research (NICR).
His research, at Newcastle University, focuses on childhood acute lymphoblastic leukaemia (ALL), a type of blood cancer that starts from white blood cells called lymphocytes.
Every year in the UK around 500 young people are diagnosed with ALL, but it is most common in children aged 0-4 years old.
Although treatment for this kind of cancer is often successful, there are still some youngsters for whom it doesn’t work. And even when things go well, the gruelling treatment can leave longterm side effects.
With this new funding, the experts hope to uncover new drug combinations with which to treat childhood ALL – combinations that improve survival and have fewer side effects.
Professor Vormoor said: “There are children with ALL who do not respond to treatment, so we need to develop more options for them. And current treatments have side-effects that can have consequences decades later.
“That’s why we want and need to find new, better and kinder treatments for children diagnosed with cancer – so they can survive their cancer and do so with a good quality of life. ”
Another team to benefit from this funding is one led by Professor Steve Clifford, Professor Simon Bailey and Dr Dan Williamson, who are studying medulloblastoma, the most common aggressive brain tumour in children.
Prof Clifford’s team hope to closely study the individual biology of the cancer, aiming to target treatment so that only children with the most aggressive cancers are given the most aggressive treatment.
The third portion of the funding will go to scientists investigating cure for liver cancer.
The team – which includes Dr Helen Reeves, a consultant gastroenterologist based in the NICR – will study the role of a specific type of immune cell, called neutrophils, in the development of the cancer, and how they act at different stages of the disease. They hope this understanding could help develop drugs which help a persons’ own immune system fight their cancer, without damaging their liver.
Dr Reeves said: “In the UK deaths from Hepatocellular carcinoma, or liver cancer, unlike other cancers, are rising markedly.
“The treatments we have right now don’t work very well, partly because the amount of drug needed to kill cancer cells damage the liver and cause liver failure.”