Scientists to ‘birth’ tumour in bid to understand origins of cancer

SCIENTISTS ARE on a quest to stop cancer from occurring in the first place by “birthing” a tumour in lab-grown human tissue.

A new cross-Atlantic research alliance hopes to shift cancer treatment from the “expensive firefighting of late-stage disease” to “rapid, cost-effective” intervention at the earliest point.

By creating a “living laboratory” of human tissue, they hope to “birth” a cancer which would help them better understand its origins, and ultimately prevent it from developing.

Scientists are already investigating how to take cells out of someone at high risk of developing cancer and reproduce them using a 3D printer to test under what conditions they are most likely to turn cancerous.

They also hope to develop screening tests that will detect multiple cancers, and use the power of imaging technology to identify which cells are most likely to become dangerous – and therefore avoid over-diagnosing patients. The International Alliance for Cancer Early Detection (ACED) is made up of experts from Cancer Research UK, Stanford University, the University of Cambridge, University College London (UCL) and the University of Manchester.

Dr David Crosby, head of early detection research at Cancer Research UK, said: “One of the fundamental problems in early detection science which this is pointing towards is in a human being we never get to see a cancer being born.

“By the time you find a person who has cancer, that cancer is already kind of established, and cancer is a disease that evolves over its lifetime – it starts off as one thing but it changes and fragments and breaks and mutates over time. So by the time you are looking at a cancer in a person you say ‘Well how can I detect that, let me measure its molecules’, the molecules it has now are not necessarily the ones it had at the start, so this kind of technology, if you can essentially give birth to a cancer in a piece of synthetic human tissue in the lab, you can see what it’s like on day one and hopefully be able to detect and intercept it.” Survival rates increase three-fold for six different types of cancer if caught early at stage one, when the cancer is usually small and localised.