Completed Cancer Genetics & Molecular Biology

MRC/CR-UK Gray Institute for Radiation Oncology and Biology, Oxford - MRC Core Grant

Funder MRC (part of UKRI)
Recipient organisation
Funding £20.0M
Period Mar 2007 — Mar 2012

In plain English

AI plain-English summary

More than half of all cancer patients will receive radiation therapy, yet some tumours stubbornly resist it while others are easily destroyed. This matters because doctors cannot reliably predict which cancers will respond to radiation, and they have few tools to make resistant tumours more vulnerable. The researchers are hunting for the specific genes that allow certain cancers to survive radiation by rapidly repairing the DNA damage the treatment causes. If they can identify those genes, they may be able to develop drugs that switch them off or block their activity, effectively stripping resistant cancers of their defences. If this fundamental science succeeds, it could transform radiation oncology. Instead of delivering the same dose to every patient, doctors might one day test a tumour’s genetic profile and pair radiation with a targeted drug that disables its repair machinery. The immediate goal is not a new treatment in the clinic, but a deeper understanding of why some cancers cheat death. Similar fundamental discoveries about DNA repair have already led to drugs such as PARP inhibitors, now used to treat breast and ovarian cancers.

View original technical description
Radiation therapy is one of the most commonly used ways to treat cancer. More than 50% of all patients with cancer will receive radiation as part of their treatment. For reasons we do not completely understand radiation is much more effective for treating some kinds of cancer than others. We are trying to understand why it is that some cancers do not respond to treatment. If we can understand what causes some kinds of cancer to fail to respond we may be able to come up with ways to make the treatment more effective. We believe that we may be able to identify some genes that are active in resistant cancers that if we could turn the genes off, or come up with a drug that would interfere with how the gene works, that would then cause the cancer to be more easily cured with radiation. For example radiation causes damage to the DNA in cancer cells but some kinds of cancer are very good at repairing the damage that the radiation causes so they can survive high doses of radiation. If we could interfere with the way the cancer repairs the damage it might make the cancer more sensitive to radiation and would make it easier for us to cure the patient. This is an example of the kind of things this proposal will study.

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Researchers

William Gillies McKenna (Principal Investigator)

Related Research

Grants with similar aims, by meaning.

Cancer Research UK Radiation Research Unit at the University of Cambridge
Elucidation of novel molecular mechanisms of radiation resistance and their application to clinical radiotherapy trials
Cancer Research UK Radiation Research Centre of Excellence at The Institute of Cancer Research and The Royal Marsden Hospital
SIEVERT: Studying tumour EVolution during External beam Radiation Therapy
Radiotherapy activated materials for enhanced cancer treatments

Original classification

Research Grant

Plain English summaries and category classifications on this site are generated by AI and may not perfectly reflect the original research.