January 2009 podcast transcript

00:00

Kat: In this month's podcast we look back over our progress in 2008, and hear about our new five-year research strategy, aiming to make a real impact on cancer survival over the coming years.

Coming up later, we hear from our Nobel Prize-winning scientist Tim Hunt, to hear how he's been finding clues to cancer in an unexpected place.

01:00

Kat: 2008 was a busy year for us here at Cancer Research UK, with 4,500 scientists, doctors and nurses all working hard to beat cancer.

As you can imagine, it's hard to select the highlights from the huge number of discoveries that have been made, but here are a few of my favourites.

In recent years, we've seen huge advances in gene sequencing technology, which Cancer Research UK has invested in. In February 2008, our researchers identified seven new regions of the human genome involved in prostate cancer - a much-needed boost for researchers looking for new ways to diagnose and treat the disease. And last year scientists also discovered genes involved in lung cancer and childhood cancer.

Another important discovery was made only a couple of months ago, as scientists at our Cambridge Research Institute uncovered the molecular nuts and bolts that underlie resistance to the breast cancer drug tamoxifen. And we launched a clinical trial of a new drug called a PARP inhibitor, designed to treat breast and ovarian cancer in women with faults in their BRCA1 or BRCA2 genes.

We also saw the publication of important clinical trial results, showing that shorter courses of radiotherapy were just as effective as longer courses for early breast cancer. And our researchers also found that radiotherapy could be as effective as surgery for treating bladder cancer, which is particularly important for elderly patients, because surgery in this age group can have a big impact on quality of life.

And finally, Cancer Research UK-funded scientists made an exciting discovery, showing that bowel cancer can be fuelled by rogue stem cells. Here's lead researcher Dr Owen Sansom, from the Beatson Institute in Glasgow, to explain more about their findings.

"What we were trying to do is work out where bowel cancer originates, in terms of which cells are the root of bowel cancer. So what we wanted to do was to see if the stem cells cause cancer.

We found that if we take out the APC gene - the major gene that is mutated in colon cancer, about 80 per cent of patients that have bowel cancer have a mutation in their APC gene - if we take out that gene specifically in stem cells, we got rapid cancer formation within 20 days."

Kat: This is only a snapshot of our progress this year, and you can read much more about our work on our Science Update blog. And you can find out about our progress and achievements over the past 100 years on our News and Resources website.

03:33

Kat: Cancer Research UK has a history that stretches back over a century, and our work has had a major impact on the way that people with cancer are treated today, and the improved survival rates we now see for many types of cancer. But there's still a lot more that we need to do.

At the end of November we announced our new five-year strategy for research. I spoke to Chief Executive Harpal Kumar, to find out why we need this strategy, and what's in it.

"In the last few years we have clearly set out what we think our role is for the organisation, and we've also established ten very aspirational goals for what we want to see achieved in cancer in the UK between now and 2020. What the strategy does is lays out exactly what we're going to be doing over the next five years to make progress towards those goals.

We've gone through a large exercise of analysis and consultation with the research community both within the UK and internationally. We have been very engaged with discussions around cancer policy issues and so on.

And we've essentially collated all that information and assessed where the real needs are over the next five or ten years, and therefore where we should focus our efforts, particularly related to research - where we can make a substantial impact at an international level in terms of improving prevention, diagnosis and treatment of cancer.

There are a number of things that are really important within this strategy. First of all, we will continue to do work that is at the cutting edge in terms of being the very best research, and research that will have the greatest impact. Within that, we intend to maintain those areas that we've always been strong at.

That's basic science - trying to understand why cancer happens in the first place and how it develops - discovering and developing new drugs that can treat cancer, population level research so that we understand at a large scale level what sort of factors influence the development of cancer, and clinical research so that we can really assess in patients those treatments that work and those that don't. So all of those are our traditional strengths.

But within this strategy we've also developed a number of themes that we want to expand going forwards. So we've looked at cancers where not enough progress has been made over the past twenty or thirty years. Areas like cancer of the pancreas, oesophageal cancer and lung cancer. And we intend to increase our investment in those areas.

We've looked at types of treatment that haven't had enough research - surgery and radiotherapy. We know that the vast majority of patients at some point will undergo surgery or radiotherapy but they both need more research to improve techniques, and improve the ability of those treatments to really make a difference in survival.

We've looked at areas of new technology that can really help our overall research effort. Imaging, which is a very promising range of technologies that can help us treat patients better, and can help us diagnose patients better. A number of areas in which we think that over the next five years by investing more we can really make a difference.

All of this is brought together within our five main institutes. And we're hoping to develop up to twenty centres of real excellence across the UK that bring together our research activities with the NHS service delivery and efforts to really engage the local community in what we're doing. Through those centres we make a real impact in improving cancer across a number of different dimensions.

I hope that in five years we will have made further dramatic progress towards achieving our goals. For every one of our goals - be it about improving survival or earlier diagnosis - we will have made measurable progress, so that far fewer people are dying from cancer."

Kat: If you'd like to find out more about our strategy, then have a look at our website.

08:19

Kat: People often think of cancer as being a uniquely human problem. But many of the things we know about cancer came from rather unlikely sources. Fruit flies, frog eggs, tiny worms and even yeast have given us important clues as to how human cancers develop and grow. This fundamental laboratory research is what underpins the cancer treatments of tomorrow.

This month our roving reporter Anna Lacey finds out how sea urchins helped Nobel Laureate Tim Hunt to learn about the cell cycle - the process that all living things use to make new cells.

Tim Hunt package

"The cell cycle is really the machinery that allows cells to divide. If cells can't divide then that's it. The trouble with cancer cells is that they grow out of control, and generally speaking when cells get above a certain size they divide. The trouble with cancer cells is that they have no trouble dividing when they grow, and therefore the lump grows."

Only 30 years ago, no-one knew what was controlling this growing and dividing. All researchers had seen was that an enzyme called MPF seemed to switch the cell cycle on and off - but how it worked was a mystery. Tim Hunt was eventually going to find an answer. His early work looked at red blood cells and how they made proteins - something known as protein synthesis. But after finding out everything he wanted to know, he made the crucial move into studying sea urchins.

"I wanted to study sea urchin eggs because in the sea urchin egg they do very little protein synthesis when they're shed into the sea, but if they meet a sperm and get fertilised, then they turn on protein synthesis rather sharply and a lot.

One day I did a very simple experiment, and what I discovered was that one of the proteins whose synthesis got turned on when they were fertilised, it suddenly disappeared just before the cells divided. Then it came back again, and then it disappeared again. And if you stopped it coming, then the cells couldn't divide.

So it was fairly obvious to say “Oh my goodness, what's going on here is that you make something that catalyses cell division, and then having filled up [the cell] with this enzyme, you've got to get rid of it, otherwise you stay in the process of division permanently. And it turned out to be the missing key to cell division - no-one had realised that in order to get a cell to divide, you had to get rid of the stuff that made it divide in the first place."

This 'stuff' was named cyclin because of the way it cycled through periods of appearing and disappearing. And it turned out that cyclin was one of the main components of the enzyme MPF, which gets the cell cycle going. Tim won a share of Nobel Prize in 2001 for this discovery. But what does a protein in a sea urchin egg have to do with humans and cancer?

"I remember people criticising Walter Bodmer when he was head of Cancer Research UK for hiring a yeast geneticist, Paul Nurse, because "we already knew enough about cancer cells, and it was pointless studying yeast because they didn't even get cancer." But then Paul discovered the partner to my protein, the cyclin-dependent kinase, and people changed their tune pretty fast, because they realised that they hadn't actually understood.

If you had tried to study these very fundamental processes in human cells, I don't think you'd have got very far very quickly at all, because they're hidden under a lot of stuff that makes it much harder to see. I was lucky in sea urchins, because this protein was one of the most abundant proteins - it was really easy to see it. but everything in life basically works the same way, so if you find out something in some obscure jellyfish, you know it's going to be the same in humans."

So through the work of people like Tim, the eggs of a sea urchin are helping us understand cancer and maybe even treat it. But as with any great scientist, answering one question means moving on to another.

"The great mystery is why don't most of the cells in our body actually grow. I like to focus on the nose. You have a new nose roughly every seven years - not a single molecule is original to your nose at birth. But the nose stays the same size, it neither grows nor shrinks. And it's very mysterious how you just stay the same.

What happens in cancers is that they start growing when they shouldn't. They somehow ignore the signals to just stay the same. But staying the same - as anybody who's ever walked a tightrope will know - is easier said than done, and needs a lot of controls that you don't even realise are there because it's so stable."

The mystery of how cells know when to stop growing and what that means for cancer is being unravelled by another Cancer Research UK scientist called Nic Tapon. We'll be hearing from him and his model organism - the fruit fly - in next month's podcast.

14:29

We've reached the end once more so we hope you've enjoyed this month's podcast. You can keep up to date with all the latest progress in research from our Science Update blog. And please let us know what you think of this podcast by leaving feedback on the blog, or emailing your comments to podcast@cancer.org.uk.

We'll be back next month with all the latest news from Cancer Research UK, so until then, goodbye!

• Credits:
• Presented and produced by Kat Arney
• Tim Hunt package by Anna Lacey
• Original music written and performed by Kat Arney and Henry Scowcroft
• With special thanks to all the participants