OGUN, Nigeria (VOICE OF NAIJA)- With a whooping £11 million donation from an anonymous donor, the Early Cancer Institute, Cambridge University have started focusing on finding ways to tackle cancer tumours before they produce symptoms.
The research will exploit recent discoveries that have shown that many people develop precancerous conditions that lie in abeyance for long periods.
The Institute Director, Prof. Rebecca Fitzgerald said the latency for a cancer to develop can go on for years, sometimes for a decade or two, before the condition abruptly manifests itself to patients.
Then doctors find they are struggling to treat a tumour which, by then, has spread through a patient’s body.
She claims a different approach is needed, one that can detect a person at risk of cancer early on using tests that can be given to large numbers of people.
“One example of this is the cytosponge- a sponge on a string which has been developed by Fitzgerald and her team – it is swallowed like a pill, expands in the stomach into a sponge and is then pulled up the gullet collecting oesophagus cells on the way.
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“Those cells that contain a protein, called “TEF3” which is found only in precancerous cells then provide an early warning that a patient is at risk of oesophageal cancer and needs to be monitored.
“Crucially, this test can be administered simply and on a wide scale.
“This contrasts with current approaches to other cancers.
“At present, we are detecting many cancers late and are having to come up with medicines, which have become incrementally more expensive. We are often extending life by a few weeks at a cost of tens of thousands of pounds. we need to look at this from a different perspective,” she said.
One approach being taken by the institute which is to be renamed the LI Ka-shing Early cancer institute after the Hong Kong philanthropist who has supported other cambridge cancer research focuses on blood samples provided by women as part of past screening services for ovarian cancer and kept in special stores, these samples have now been repurposed by the institute.
A research group leader, Jamie Blundell, said: “We have around 200,000 such samples and they are a goldmine.
Using these samples, researchers have identified changes that differentiate those donors who have subsequently been diagnosed with blood cancer 10 or even 20 years after they provided samples, with those who did not develop such conditions.
“We are finding that there are clear genetic changes in a person’s blood more than a decade before they start to display symptoms of leukemia,” said Blundell.