Posts

June 14, 2013

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3:07 PM | Sticky cells, blood vessels and cancer – the paradox of Claudin-14

How do our bodies form new blood vessels? This is a key question in cancer research, as tumours need to develop a new blood supply to grow. Last summer, Dr Marianne Baker finished her Cancer Research UK-funded PhD in the … Continue reading →

June 07, 2013

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12:35 PM | The Francis Crick Institute – three steps closer to reality

In a little over two years, the Francis Crick Institute will open its doors to researchers from across the globe, giving them a state-of-the-art environment in which to answer the fundamental questions of human biology. The Institute, based in London, … Continue reading →

June 05, 2013

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8:00 AM | Wobbling molecules help scientists study brain tumours in children

Despite the huge progress that’s been made in treating many types of childhood cancer, brain tumours are lagging behind. Although these diseases are relatively rare – and the chances of surviving have increased over the past few decades – brain … Continue reading →

May 26, 2013

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5:01 PM | Joining the dots – how lab research can lead to new approaches for treating cancer

At its heart, cancer is a disease that starts when genes go wrong. This can happen when the DNA in your cells gets damaged, for example by tobacco smoke, UV radiation in sunlight, or just the normal chemical reactions of … Continue reading →

May 20, 2013

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7:00 AM | Celebrating International Clinical Trials Day

We’ve written many times about clinical trials on this blog. Trials tell us which treatments work, and their results boost the progress we’re making in helping to improve cancer survival. We’re writing about them again now because today is International … Continue reading →

May 13, 2013

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9:48 AM | Funding the very best science – how does it work?

Our research is funded by the public – around 80p in every pound donated to us is spent on this vital work – so we have a responsibility to make sure our supporters’ cash gets spent on the very best science … Continue reading →

April 23, 2013

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5:15 PM | Innovative drug development fund backs first major project

Last year we were extremely excited to launch an innovative fund to bring new cancer drugs to patients. Today we’re pleased to reveal that the fund has given the green light to its first project, aimed at accelerating the development … Continue reading →

April 14, 2013

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5:01 PM | New type of bowel cancer discovered – but what does it mean?

Thanks to advances in research over the years, we know more about cancer than ever before, with new discoveries being made all the time. In some cases this knowledge has led to life-saving new treatments. In others, it causes frustration … Continue reading →

De Sousa E Melo F., Wang X., Jansen M., Fessler E., Trinh A., de Rooij L.P.M.H., de Jong J.H., de Boer O.J., van Leersum R. & Bijlsma M.F. & (2013). Poor-prognosis colon cancer is defined by a molecularly distinct subtype and develops from serrated precursor lesions, Nature Medicine, DOI: 10.1038/nm.3174

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April 08, 2013

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11:43 AM | Watching cancers evolve using ‘liquid biopsies’

Sometimes it feels like cancer research is progressing at a dizzying speed. Just last year, we reported how Cancer Research UK scientists had reconstructed the evolution of a patient’s kidney tumour during treatment – one of many studies over the … Continue reading →

Murtaza M., Dawson S.J., Tsui D.W.Y., Gale D., Forshew T., Piskorz A.M., Parkinson C., Chin S.F., Kingsbury Z. & Wong A.S.C. & (2013). Non-invasive analysis of acquired resistance to cancer therapy by sequencing of plasma DNA, Nature, DOI: 10.1038/nature12065

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March 27, 2013

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4:15 PM | Gene variations and cancer risk – more results, more answers and more questions

A thousand scientists from one hundred international research groups working over four years. Thirteen papers spread across five journals. DNA analysis of two hundred thousand people. And eighty new genetic variations, or SNPs (pronounced “snips”) linked to three different types … Continue reading →

March 21, 2013

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10:33 AM | New bowel screening test introduced in England

Back in December we wrote about Jeremy Hunt’s announcement that six centres in England would start using Bowel Scope Screening (BSS, also known as flexi-scope or flexible sigmoidoscopy) as part of their bowel screening programme in 2013. This week, 55 … Continue reading →

March 14, 2013

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3:28 PM | A day in the life of Birmingham Cancer Research UK Centre

Ever wondered what actually goes on inside a cancer research lab? The Birmingham Cancer Research UK Centre is a partnership between Cancer Research UK, the University of Birmingham, University Hospitals Birmingham NHS Foundation Trust and Birmingham Children’s Hospital Foundation Trust. Yesterday, the centre’s staff – … Continue reading →

March 13, 2013

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10:01 PM | Blood test tracks breast cancer

Cancer is a wily enemy. It mutates and spreads within the body and becomes resistant to treatment. Understanding and counteracting this tricksy behaviour is the greatest challenge for researchers and doctors, and is the key to bringing forward lasting cancer … Continue reading →

Dawson S.J., Tsui D.W.Y., Murtaza M., Biggs H., Rueda O.M., Chin S.F., Dunning M.J., Gale D., Forshew T. & Mahler-Araujo B. & (2013). Analysis of Circulating Tumor DNA to Monitor Metastatic Breast Cancer, New England Journal of Medicine, 130313140010009. DOI: 10.1056/NEJMoa1213261

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March 07, 2013

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6:05 PM | Bacon battered? Today’s headlines explained

As if the horsemeat scandal wasn’t bad enough, this morning’s headlines brought further news of the dangers of eating too much processed meat: an increased risk of an early grave. The news come from a huge Europe-wide study – called … Continue reading →

Rohrmann S., Overvad K., Bueno-de-Mesquita H.B., Jakobsen M.U., Egeberg R., Tjonneland A., Nailler L., Boutron-Ruault M.C., Clavel-Chapelon F. & Krogh V. & (2013). Meat consumption and mortality - results from the European Prospective Investigation into Cancer and Nutrition, BMC Medicine, 11 (1) 63. DOI: 10.1186/1741-7015-11-63

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March 06, 2013

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7:00 PM | Leaders team up to combat cancer worldwide

Today, leaders from cancer organisations across the world – from Australia to Argentina, and Taiwan to Turkey – have issued a joint statement about how to address the growing burden of cancer worldwide. It’s the first time that so many … Continue reading →

February 28, 2013

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5:20 PM | MPs have a go at ‘citizen science’

We’ve been talking about our new ‘citizen science’ work a fair bit recently on this blog. But it’s important to make sure that MPs are up to date with our latest projects. So yesterday we went to Parliament to tell … Continue reading →

February 27, 2013

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6:00 PM | Order from chaos – making sense of bowel cancer’s scrambled DNA

Last year, researchers at our London Research Institute published what became – after the discovery of the Higgs boson – the second most-referenced science paper of 2012 Their study looked at how tumours ‘evolve’ during treatment, and showed that, genetically speaking, … Continue reading →

Burrell R.A., McClelland S.E., Endesfelder D., Groth P., Weller M.C., Shaikh N., Domingo E., Kanu N., Dewhurst S.M. & Gronroos E. & (2013). Replication stress links structural and numerical cancer chromosomal instability, Nature, 494 (7438) 492-496. DOI: 10.1038/nature11935

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February 25, 2013

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2:53 PM | Introducing our latest arsenal in the fight against cancer

Thanks to the generosity of our supporters, we’re able to spend hundreds of millions of pounds every year on life-saving cancer research. And our highly experienced Science Committee makes sure this money goes to fund the most creative, promising and … Continue reading →

February 20, 2013

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12:01 AM | Stargazing to spot cancer

Today our researchers announce the results of an exciting project bringing together two unlikely scientific bedfellows – astronomy and pathology. Back in 2010, Dr Raza Ali and his team at our Cancer Research UK Cambridge Institute joined forces with the University … Continue reading →

Ali H.R., Irwin M., Morris L., Dawson S.J., Blows F.M., Provenzano E., Mahler-Araujo B., Pharoah P.D., Walton N.A. & Brenton J.D. & (2013). Astronomical algorithms for automated analysis of tissue protein expression in breast cancer., British journal of cancer, PMID: 23329232

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February 19, 2013

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10:29 AM | Tracing the roots of breast cancer

Our bodies are made of hundreds of different types of cells. And when processes inside them go wrong, and allow them to keep dividing uncontrollably, cancers form. But individual cells are very small – by the time tumours (which are … Continue reading →

Shehata M., Teschendorff A., Sharp G., Novcic N., Russell I.A., Avril S., Prater M., Eirew P., Caldas C. & Watson C.J. & (2012). Phenotypic and functional characterisation of the luminal cell hierarchy of the mammary gland, Breast Cancer Research, 14 (5) R134. DOI: 10.1186/bcr3334

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February 12, 2013

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11:34 AM | Lung cancer in the UK – earlier diagnosis and better treatment are crucial

We’ve blogged before about the International Cancer Benchmarking Partnership (ICBP) – a collaboration between researchers trying to understand how and why cancer survival varies between different countries. Earlier this month, they looked into differences in attitudes to, and awareness of, cancer … Continue reading →

Sarah W. (2013). Lung cancer survival and stage at diagnosis in Australia, Canada, Denmark, Norway, Sweden and the UK: a population-based study, 2004–2007, Thorax, DOI: 10.1136/thoraxjnl-2012-202297

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February 07, 2013

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5:00 PM | What about my type of cancer?

“Why don’t you spend more on my cancer type?” and “why don’t you do more to highlight awareness?” These are two questions we hear frequently, and topics that are close to many of our supporters’ hearts. Understandably, everyone who has … Continue reading →

February 01, 2013

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1:58 PM | Feeling the heat – the link between inflammation and cancer

Regular readers will know that the infrastructure supporting a tumour – its ‘microenvironment’ – is a hot topic in cancer research at the moment. In our previous post in this series, we looked at how otherwise healthy cells collude to … Continue reading →

January 18, 2013

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4:56 PM | Getting to the root of tumour blood vessels

In the first of this series we explained how the ‘neighbourhood’, or microenvironment, around a cancer affects how it grows and spreads. In this next post we’re taking a look at how blood vessels grow into, and feed, a tumour. Angiogenesis … Continue reading →

December 27, 2012

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7:00 AM | Paul Nurse: From waking the nation up to building a world-class research institute

If you regularly wake up to Radio 4’s Today Programme, you might have heard a special edition edited by Professor Sir Paul Nurse this morning. A former CEO of Cancer Research UK, Professor Nurse is director of the Francis Crick … Continue reading →

December 22, 2012

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11:17 AM | News digest – cancer risk, prostate genes, melanoma, immune system faults and more

Thankfully (at least as we write this) the world hasn’t ended, so we’re able to welcome you to our final news digest of 2012. We start with our big story this week: despite improved survival, boys born in 2027 will … Continue reading →

December 20, 2012

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5:01 PM | Tissue study turns tables on prostate cancer

As we heard yesterday, a man’s lifetime risk of developing cancer is set to climb to one in two by 2027, and one of the biggest reasons is an increase in prostate cancer rates. But research is bringing hope that … Continue reading →

December 18, 2012

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3:21 PM | Clinical trials: Helping more children beat cancer every year

December is childhood cancer awareness month, so we thought we’d focus on an area that contributed more to saving children’s lives from cancer than anything else – clinical trials. More and more children are now surviving cancer, and today there’s … Continue reading →

December 17, 2012

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9:00 AM | 2012 – A year of progress

This year has been as busy as ever and we’ve made great progress made in all aspects of our work, from lab research to clinical trials and policy to prevention. Here are some of our key successes in a couple … Continue reading →

December 15, 2012

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9:57 AM | The NHS reforms – are they affecting cancer care?

Next April, the Government’s much-discussed NHS reforms come in to full effect. But preparation is already underway for what many see as one of the biggest changes to the NHS’s structure in its lifetime. Staff around the NHS are being … Continue reading →

June 14, 2013

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