Grant of £105,000 offers new hope for patients with bowel cancer

Published on Tuesday 25 March 2008 21:48

SCIENTISTS are to use pioneering technology to explore new ways of diagnosing and treating bowel cancer, it was announced yesterday.

The University of Aberdeen has been awarded a grant of more then 105,000 to examine proteins in bowel cancer cells.

The team will use a new technology called proteomics to identify changes in proteins at various stages of tumour growth.

Around 3,500 people a year in Scotland are diagnosed with bowel cancer.

Professor Graeme Murray, of the university's department of pathology, who is leading the research, said: "Cells have complex internal mechanism involving many different protein molecules which carry out a wide range of functions.

"There are known to be small but important differences in the proteins found in normal and cancer cells.

"We will use a large collection of bowel cancer samples which have very good information about the stage of each cancer.

"We will look for characteristic changes in the proteins of each (and] use this information as a new way to diagnose the stages of this killer cancer."

Funding has come from the Association for International Cancer Research (AICR).

Dr Mark Matfield, AICR's scientific adviser, said: "Although the outlook for patients with this type of cancer has improved significantly over the last 20 years, currently only about half of patients survive five years after diagnosis.

"Professor Murray's work may lead to better methods of diagnosis and treatment."