A CANCER breakthrough has been made by experts at Warrington’s Daresbury Laboratory, who have solved a puzzle that has confounded scientists for more than 30 years.
The breakthrough in understanding a biological process that causes many common cancers, including lung and breast cancer, opens up a whole new realm of possibilities for the development of improved cancer drugs.
Researchers at the STFC Central Laser Facility (CLF) and and Computational Science and Engineering Department (CSED) – both based at Daresbury – have discovered a previously unknown molecular shape partly responsible for transmitting the signals that instruct cells within the body when to grow and divide.
It is the uncontrolled growth of cells that causes cancer to spread through the body. Until now, not enough was known about how these molecules, known as epidermal growth factor receptors (EGFRs), transmit messages in the development of cancer.
This means drugs designed to stop them transmitting these cancer-inducing signals have also been limited in their effectiveness.
Project leader Dr Marisa Martin-Fernandez said: “A number of drugs aim to limit EGFRs’ role in spreading cancer but because human EGFRs haven’t been well understood, the drugs are designed simply to block every signal they transmit. But the human body is good at compensating for losses of function so it finds ways of bypassing blocked receptors to allow cancerous cells to grow again. Unfortunately the current drugs therefore all too often only provide temporary remission.
“Potentially this enables the pharmaceutical industry to develop drugs that target EGFRs’ cancer-related functions more specifically but also allow the receptors to go on performing other tasks. This makes it less likely that the body will try to compensate for total loss of function.”
Dr Martyn Winn of the CSED at Daresbury said: “The key has been close collaboration between the experimental and computational teams involved.”
