{"id":27420,"date":"2021-09-08T10:55:45","date_gmt":"2021-09-08T10:55:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/news.cancerresearchuk.org\/?p=23515"},"modified":"2024-11-03T15:14:30","modified_gmt":"2024-11-03T15:14:30","slug":"thinking-outside-the-box-to-tackle-an-aggressive-childrens-cancer","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ogkologos.com\/en\/thinking-outside-the-box-to-tackle-an-aggressive-childrens-cancer\/","title":{"rendered":"Thinking outside the box to tackle an aggressive children\u2019s cancer"},"content":{"rendered":"
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In March, we announced the winners of the inaugural Cancer Research UK\u2013<\/strong><\/em>Children with Cancer UK Innovation Awards. Six months on, we caught up with Dr Sam Behjati about how the \u00a31m awards are allowing his team to use big data to chart the origins of an often-fatal type of children\u2019s cancer.<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\"Dr<\/p>\n

Dr Sam Behjati<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

From the body parts affected and the treatments employed, to the long-term side effects experienced, children\u2019s cancers differ fundamentally from adult cancers.<\/p>\n

While the latter most commonly arise from decades of acquiring mutations each time a cell divides, the causes of children\u2019s and young people\u2019s cancers are less well understood, although we believe that many are due to errors that occur during embryonic development. As a result, some cancers that occur in children and young people almost never emerge in adults and vice versa.<\/p>\n

The need for distinct approaches and unique research is clear. That\u2019s why, back in March, we joined forces with fellow charity Children with Cancer UK<\/a> to co-fund the Cancer Research UK\u2013Children with Cancer UK Innovation Awards<\/a>, granting 5 teams up to \u00a31m each to realise creative, ambitious projects that we believe can bring about game-changing discoveries.<\/p>\n

Six months on, we\u2019re back on a video call with Dr Sam Behjati, one of the team\u2019s co-leaders, to hear how the funding is allowing his team to use big data to chart the origins of a rare children\u2019s cancer called rhabdomyosarcoma.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe must try something new\u201d<\/h2>\n

Rhabdomyosarcoma is believed to originate in cells that play an important role in embryonic development.<\/p>\n

Around 55 children are diagnosed with the disease each year in the UK*. For some children, if they have a certain sub-type of rhabdomyosarcoma and it\u2019s caught at a very early stage, the disease can be effectively treated. \u201cHowever, most children with rhabdomyosarcoma do not fall into this category,\u201d explains Behjati, who\u2019s based at the Wellcome Sanger Institute and co-leads the award-winning team with Dr Karin Straathof at University College London. \u201cUnfortunately, many children die from the disease.\u201d<\/p>\n

What\u2019s more, progress has been slower for this cancer type than other children\u2019s and young people\u2019s cancers. Thanks to long-term investment in research, we\u2019ve come a long way since the 1970s when children\u2019s cancer survival was much lower than it is today. Now, on average, around 8 in 10 children and young people diagnosed with cancer will survive their cancer for 10 years or more.<\/p>\n

\u201cAll cancers are horrible, but some of them we\u2019re doing okay at treating,\u201d explains Behjati. \u201cBut in rhabdomyosarcoma, we\u2019ve hit a brick wall. We\u2019ve tried chemotherapy in all its combinations, variations and intensities, and we\u2019re still seeing very poor outcomes. The status quo is unacceptable. We must try something new.\u201d<\/p>\n

An opportunity to think big<\/h2>\n

Enter the Cancer Research UK\u2013Children with Cancer UK Innovation Awards, which give researchers the funding and creative freedom to explore new avenues of investigation, in the belief that they could drastically improve outcomes for children and young people facing cancer in future.<\/p>\n

\n

\u201cThat the funders had the vision to support blue-sky thinking is astonishing \u2013 it\u2019s exactly what we need to tackle this horrible disease\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\u201cWhat distinguishes these awards is that they\u2019re so much bolder in approach and ambition,\u201d says Behjati. \u201cThat the funders had the vision to support blue-sky thinking is astonishing \u2013 it\u2019s exactly what we need to tackle this horrible disease.\u201d<\/p>\n

And blue-sky is fitting, given Behjati\u2019s team \u2013 which he describes as a \u201cbrilliant hodgepodge of people\u201d \u2013 contains an astrophysicist, alongside a mathematician, a bioinformatician, clinicians and PhD students \u201cfrom all strands of research life\u201d.<\/p>\n

Together, they\u2019re pooling their varied skills and expertise to collect and analyse large amounts of genetic data that will give us greater understanding of how rhabdomyosarcoma begins and develops \u2013 information that could be used to develop new, more effective treatments with fewer side effects.<\/p>\n

Creating a cell \u2018atlas\u2019 to find new treatment targets<\/h2>\n

Behjati and his team are working with clinicians at Great Ormond Street Hospital \u2013 the UK\u2019s largest paediatric oncology unit \u2013 to collect tumour samples from children with rhabdomyosarcoma in their care.<\/p>\n

The team then apply single-cell RNA sequencing \u2013 a process that allows Behjati and his team to \u2018read\u2019 every individual molecule and cell within each sample. \u201cThis technology shows us all of the cancer and non-cancer cells in the sample and tells us what they do,\u201d explains Behjati. \u201cSo, you learn what it means to be a rhabdomyosarcoma cancer cell but also about how it interacts with healthy cells.\u201d<\/p>\n

By creating an intricate cell \u2018atlas\u2019 to identify and lay out every component of a sample, and comparing and measuring this against a healthy equivalent, the team hopes to spot the differences and find potential treatment targets.<\/p>\n

And they\u2019ve already made some interesting findings, including the discovery of foetal genes that are repurposed by rhabdomyosarcoma cells. These genes shouldn\u2019t exist after birth \u2013 they only persist to do cancer\u2019s bidding. \u201cThese genes are highly attractive to us because we could target them with treatments,\u201d says Behjati. \u201cThis discovery opens up a whole other box of potential translational applications of the data that we generate.\u201d<\/p>\n

For Behjati and his team, who are still only at the beginning of this exciting project, the future already looks brighter for children with rhabdomyosarcoma.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s lovely to see some progress,\u201d he says, \u201cI\u2019m very hopeful.\u201d<\/p>\n

*Source: \u201cPublic Health England.<\/em> Children, teenagers and young adults UK cancer statistics report 2021<\/em><\/a>\u201d<\/em> Based on the average annual number of new cases of rhabdomyosarcomas (ICCC-3 IXa) diagnosed in children aged 0-14 in the UK between 1997 and 2016<\/h6>\n

More on this topic<\/h3>\n<\/p>\n

Source<\/a><\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In March, we announced the winners of the inaugural Cancer Research UK\u2013Children with Cancer UK Innovation Awards. Six months on, we caught up with Dr Sam Behjati about how the \u00a31m awards are allowing his team to use big data to chart the origins of an often-fatal type of children\u2019s cancer. Dr Sam Behjati From […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5137],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-27420","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-world-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ogkologos.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27420","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ogkologos.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ogkologos.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ogkologos.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ogkologos.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=27420"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/ogkologos.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27420\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":43633,"href":"https:\/\/ogkologos.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27420\/revisions\/43633"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ogkologos.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=27420"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ogkologos.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=27420"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ogkologos.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=27420"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}