Saving lives through research

The team at the unit are working on a unique field of research termed the tumour microenvironment. Although it has been known for decades that cancer is a disease caused by faulty genes, more recently it has become apparent that cancers with the same genetic faults don’t always behave the same.

A discovery was made which revealed that many of the cells in a breast cancer are ‘normal’ rather than cancerous. These normal cells, help the cancer to grow and spread by providing blood vessels and chemicals that help the cancer cells to move around the body. This knowledge forms the overarching hypothesis that drives research in the Breakthrough Breast Cancer Research Unit, Manchester; that the normal cells and chemicals found in cancers are helping the cancer to grow and can affect how cancers respond to treatment, and possibly help the cancer become resistant to treatment. By understanding the breast cancer microenvironment and the interactions of cancer cells with normal cells, this will allow the scientists to develop new treatments and will help the fight against breast cancer hugely.

The enormous strengths of Manchester as a world-renowned locality for breast cancer research and strong links to the Christie NHS Foundation Trust will also allow scientists to focus on ‘window trials’, these are short experimental clinical trials in the window between diagnosis and starting standard treatment.  Breakthroughs made by our new research team will help women worldwide. Our investigations to date are already beginning to lead to the development of new treatments in clinical trial and we plan to assess other new treatments suggested by our experiments in the clinic over the next year.

• Globally, breast cancer accounts for 16% of all female cancers (World Health Organisation 2004).
• Nearly 48,000 women are diagnosed with breast cancer each year in the UK – with over 5,000 in the North West.
• It is the most common cancer in the UK – and the leading cause of death among women aged 34-54.
• Groundbreaking breast cancer research has increased survival rates from 5 out of 10 in the 1970s to 8 out of 10 today.
• But the reality is that more women are being diagnosed with breast cancer and too many are dying because we still don’t have the right treatments available for all the different types of the disease.

You can find out more about the science at the Manchester Unit by visiting our research website