January 2008 podcast transcript

00:00

Kat: Welcome to this month's podcast, with me, Dr Kat Arney. This month we'll be finding out what the government has in store for cancer in the future, with the publication of the Cancer Reform strategy. Millions of pounds have been pledged, but what will they spend it on?

Coming up later, we discover how the power of the immune system can be used to beat cancer. But first, here’s the news with Josephine Querido.

00:56

Josephine: Scientists at the Cancer Research UK Cambridge Research Institute have been working on a cutting edge technique that boosts the sensitivity of MRI scanning by more than ten thousand times.

The new technique could allow doctors to see if a patient's cancer is responding to chemotherapy within days of starting treatment. This is important because the sooner a doctor identifies that a drug isn't working as well as hoped, the sooner an alternative can be prescribed.

Publishing their results in the journal Nature Medicine, the scientists have been able to capture images of tumours in mice responding to treatment shortly after the drug is given to them. It is hoped further research will prove the technique is also effective in cancer patients.

Professor Kevin Brindle, lead researcher, explains more about how the technology works.

"Magnetic resonance us a relatively insensitive technique. Normally when we image, we look at the water in the tissue, as the protons in water are particularly sensitive to detection.

However what we're really iterated in doing is looking at metabolites - the molecules that cells use to make energy. We've known since the 1970s that we can get signals from these molecules, but because they’re present at very low concentrations compared to water it’s difficult to detect them.

What this technique does it to increase the signal we can obtain from these metabolites. What we do is take a compound we want to image, we polarise it then inject it intravenously. We can get so much signal from the molecules that we can image them in the body. This can tell us a lot about the biochemistry of a tumour.

We've looked at a molecule that tumours take up and use to make energy. When the tumour started to die, the rate at which the tumours used this molecule was decreased, and this gave us an early indication that the tumour was responding to drug treatment.

Things have gone very well so far in these mouse studies but there’s a lot more work to be done before this can be implemented clinically."

03:14

Josephine:Scientists funded by Cancer Research UK have found two common gene faults that could increase the risk of bowel cancer. The study was jointly led by Professor Ian Tomlinson from the London Research Institute and Professor Richard Houlston from The Institute of Cancer Research.

The researchers were searching for the gene that causes a rare inherited cancer condition called Hereditary Mixed Polyposis Syndrome, or HMPS, which is specific to the Ashkenazi Jewish population. They tracked down a region of DNA that probably harboured the HMPS gene, but couldn't find the gene itself.

So the scientists decided to widen their search to look in the same region for genes that affect bowel cancer risk in the wider population. The team found faults near two genes called SCG5 and GREM1, which both increase a person's risk of bowel cancer by a small amount.

In combination with faults in another gene region discovered last month, the researchers think that an individual's risk of bowel cancer could be increased by two to three-fold.

The new findings could have big implications for cancer treatment and screening, as well as helping people at high risk to potentially reduce their risk of bowel cancer.

04:22

And finally, Cancer Research UK has welcomed the news that the Prime Minister is supporting a new £500 million medical research partnership that will see a world-class centre established in the heart of London.

The UK Centre for Medical Research and Innovation will involve experts from Cancer Research UK, the Medical Research Council, the Wellcome Trust and University College London.

The scientific planning of the centre will be led by the Nobel prize winner Sir Paul Nurse, president of New York's Rockefeller University and former chief executive of Cancer Research UK.

The centre will be located near St Pancras and is due to be ready by the end of 2013, bringing together the nation's best scientists and the latest technology in order to advance our understanding of health and disease, including cancer.

Kat: And if you want find out more about these stories, or get the latest from the charity's scientists, and researchers around the world, then have a look at our News & Resources website.

05:26

Cases of cancer are expected to increase by a third by 2020 with nearly 300,000 people having the disease diagnosed each year.

To combat this, Health Secretary Alan Johnson recently announced the Cancer Reform strategy. The multi-million pound plan aims to improve survival from cancer in the UK, and boost prevention measures.

I spoke to Cath Foot, Head of Policy Development at Cancer Research UK, to find out what the Cancer Reform Strategy actually is, and why we need it.

"The Cancer Reform Strategy is a new 5 year strategy for cancer in England. It's needed because back in 2000 we had a cancer plan that did the same job and was enormously successful, but now in 2007 the cancer community realised it was time to update the plan and devise a new strategy for cancer.

One of the most exciting things is that the strategy is so comprehensive. It covers all aspects of cancer, from prevention - which covers things like tobacco control, sunbed use and obesity - right through to speeding up diagnosis, aiding access to screening and getting access to treatment more quickly.

It’s also providing a lot of new money for radiotherapy, an area of cancer services that has up to now been sorely lacking in funds. And it's also covering aspects of cancer services for people later in their treatment, as they become cancer survivors, and the sort of support services they might need.

We know that cancer services cost the Department of Health around £4.3 billion per year, so it's a massive amount of investment. This new strategy will put a bit more money into the system, and it's also making recommendations to the NHS about where it can save money to make cancer services more efficient.

Cancer Research UK was involved all the way through the development of this strategy. Two years ago we launched a campaign called Cancer 2020, calling on all the Governments across the UK to come up with new strategies for cancer. England has responded with the Cancer Reform Strategy.

We advised throughout the process, and we're really pleased with the results. Now the job is for the NHS to deliver against this strategy."

Kat: Cancer Research UK's Policy and Public Affairs team campaigns and lobbies the governments of the UK to keep cancer at the top of the political health agenda. You can find out more about the work of the team by visiting the public policy pages of the News & Resources website.

08:44

Kat: You probably know about surgery, chemotherapy and radiotherapy for treating cancer - but have you heard of immunotherapy? This term is used to describe treatments that use the power of the immune system to fight cancer.

Although research is still at a relatively early stage, many scientists and doctors think that immunotherapy holds great promise for the future.

Our roving reporter Alison Ross caught up with one of Cancer Research UK's top immunologists, Caetano Reis e Sousa, at the recent NCRI Cancer Conference to find out more.

"Immunotherapy is effectively an attempt to use the power of the immune system, which is normally used to fight infection, to fight tumours. It would be used as an additional therapy to existing caner therapies.

It's exciting because we recognise that the immune system is very efficient at eliminating infection, and we also believe that it can act in a very specific manner. So if we would co-opt that power to fight tumours, it would be an additional weapon against cancer.

We are at the very beginning. It is clear that a lot more research is needed before immunotherapy will be used alongside conventional cancer treatment, but we're also at an exciting point because a number of advances in basic immunology have suggested novel ways that we can approach the problem, and novel ways that we can test protocols for immunotherapy.

So I predict that it will become an increasingly important part of cancer therapy, but there is still a long way to go before that's achieved.

Immunotherapy has mainly been used in advanced melanoma, which doesn't really have a lot of good treatments. In a lot of clinical trials in melanoma, immunotherapy has given us some clinical benefit.

Perhaps the most successful trial to date involves the transfer into a patient of T cells [white blood cells] that specifically recognise melanoma. These cells were taken from the patient in the first place, then grown in the laboratory before they were given back to the patient.

My lab focuses on fundamental aspects of immunology, and trying to understand the basic principles by which the immune system functions. Having said that, we have developed a number of potential therapies, in th' sense that our work has suggested ways that we could use the immune system to fight cancer.

I’ll emphasise that this is at a very early stage, but potentially something from my laboratory could be applied in the clinic."

Kat:And you can read more about immunotherapy in the Learn About Cancer section of the News & Resources website.

12:20

We've reached the end once more so we hope you've enjoyed the podcast. Don't forget that your feedback is vital in helping us improve the show, so please send us your comments and suggestions by email to podcast@cancer.org.uk. And you can sign up to our RSS feed to get the latest Cancer Research UK podcast delivered straight to your computer every month.

We’ll be back next month with all the latest news from Cancer Research UK. Until then, have a very happy New Year. Goodbye!.

• Credits:
• Presented and produced by Kat Arney
• News by Josephine Querido and Kat Arney
• Immunotherapy interview by Alison Ross
• Original music written and performed by Kat Arney and Henry Scowcroft
• With special thanks to all the participants