Our work
Dr Helmout Modjtahedi is shown at Kingston's Faculty of Science with his PhD student Said Khelwatty. Together with specialists at St.Lukes, they are looking at existing treatments for cancer of the colon and rectum, known as colorectal cancer. By examining tumour specimens from patients, they aim to identify signs or markers which could indicate how patients respond to treatments with anti-cancer drugs. They will investigate whether cancer stem cells play an important role in the progression of the cancer, in particular if they cause poor response (or development of resistance to) the drugs. Dr Helmout Modjtahedi said " we want to find out why some patients respond well to particular drugs and yet others don't. We also want to investigate why it is that, after several cycles of chemotherapy, we tend to see resistance to the chemotherapy agents which means that they have to be changed. Ultimately we hope that the results of our investigation will help to improve survival among our patients". Initial experimental work has been carried out at the Kingston research labs and following this Said will be working at St.Lukes for the examination of the tumour specimens.
On another project, Dr. Rachel Gabitass has been researching potential new targets for treatment of upper gastrointestinal cancers (oesophageal, gastric, pancreatic). She has been looking at Myeloid-derived supressor cells and T regulatory cells which may be increased in certain of these cancers and are thought to supress the patient's normal immune system, so that it does not kill the cancer cells as it should. By testing patient's blood and tumour samples, she is comparing these cell levels with the normal levels found in a person without cancer.
These types of applied research projects normally involve taking blood and tumour samples from patients. In order to be able to increase the sample sizes and therefore improve results analysis, BRIGHT is sponsoring the setting up of a Bio-Bank at St.Lukes. A Bio-Bank contains collections of biological material and their pertinent databases which are collated for the purposes of research or routine surveys. Bio-Banks, like other DNA databases, must carefully store and document access to samples and donor information. The registration of each sample entering and exiting the system is centrally stored on a computer. The physical location of each sample is noted to allow the rapid location of specimens. Archival systems de-identify samples to respect the privacy of donors and allow blinding of researchers to analysis. The database, including clinical data, is kept separately with a secure method to link clinical information to tissue samples. Our Bio-Bank will be started by collecting tissue samples (with the agreement of patients at St.Lukes) that will be stored in special refrigeration units at the medical facility of Surrey University.
Future research projects are planned, in particular by Dr. Alexandra Stewart, who wishes to look into the improvement of radiotherapy dose delivery in pelvic cancer. She is interested in the role of brachytherapy in rectal cancer, which involves placement of radioactive sources within (or very close to) the cancer to give a highly conformal radiotherapy treatment.
