CANCER

Bloodwise 10
STRATEGIC REPORT
RESEARCH
Revealing how blood cancer works underpins our
ability to design new targeted and stratified treatment
approaches, as well as our ability to constantly refine
and increase the effectiveness of existing treatments
and reduce their toxicity.
There are cross cutting characteristics of all cancers,
sometimes called ‘hallmarks’, that are mechanisms
that must be disrupted for cancer to take hold. Because
blood cancers are different to solid tumours, some of
the hallmarks are more relevant for us than others.
Understanding of these hallmarks is unparalleled in
blood cancers and the progress that we’ve made in
this respect has enhanced understanding of diseases
beyond blood cancer.
Each cell in our body is controlled by a molecular
orchestra that governs its growth and movement. These
involve factors that stimulate growth and division,
safety switches that kick in if a cell is damaged,
a hardwired finite lifespan, and signals between
neighbouring cells to remain where they belong.
Faults in the proteins that make up these critical
control mechanisms can lead to the uncontrolled cell
growth and abnormal cell behaviour characteristic
of cancer. These faults arise when the DNA sequence
within the cell, which provides the template for
making new proteins, picks up errors.
Increasingly, we’re defining diseases by more specific
molecular changes in a cell that might respond to
different therapies.
This means we’re starting to collate patients into
groups by virtue of their likelihood to benefit from
differing therapies, rather than the traditional
definitions of the symptoms patients present with
at diagnosis and what their cells look like down a
microscope. Exciting times!
Over the next few pages we’ll give you a snapshot of
some of the research we’ve invested in this year, in the
context of the hallmarks that are relevant to us in the
blood cancer community.
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