How Moore's widow Stephanie is the driving force behind charity battling bowel cancer

Stephanie Moore has had 20 years to regret that her late husband Bobby had to wait four years to receive a bowel cancer diagnosis. Ultimately, it cost the former England captain his life.

Mrs Moore is now the driving force behind the ‘Bobby Moore Fund’, a charity that has raised nearly £19m and funded more than 50 research programmes in to the disease that killed her husband at the age of just 51.

This week she was in Manchester with England midfielder Michael Carrick, looking at some of the latest developments in to treatment at the acclaimed Paterson Institute for Cancer Research.

The Bobby Moore Fund is one of the three charity partners chosen this year by the England team through the England Footballers Foundation and Mrs Moore said: “It’s beyond value that the players do things like this for us.

'Bowel cancer is the second most common cause of cancer death in the UK, after lung cancer.

'Recent stats show the incidence of bowel cancer in men has gone up by 30 per cent in the past 35 years, but only 6 per cent in women. Around 110 people in this UK are diagnosed with it every day.'

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sport/football/article-2315525/Bobbys-widow-Stephanie-Moore-driving-force-charity-fighting-bowel-cancer.html#ixzz2TA8M4YK1 

Bowel cancers reshuffle their genetic pack to cheat treatment

Bowel cancer cells missing one of three genes can rapidly reshuffle their genetic ‘pack of cards’ – the chromosomes that hold the cell’s genetic information. This reshuffling has been previously shown to render tumours more resistant to treatment.

Cancer Research UK scientists have discovered that this genetic ‘card trick’ can be caused by the deletion of three genes found on one particular chromosome, a region known as ‘18q’.

Loss of this region is well-known in bowel cancer and the new findings help shed light on the role it plays.
The research is published in Nature today (Wednesday)1.

Normal human cells have 46 chromosomes, each of which is a long string of DNA. But in certain bowel cancers, this number can change over time - a process called chromosomal instability. This makes the cells in a tumour incredibly diverse, and helps it become resistant to treatment.

Patients whose bowel cancer cells contain particularly unstable chromosomes are known to do worse.

Read More -  http://www.cancerresearchuk.org/cancer-info/news/archive/pressrelease/2013-02-27-cancers-reshuffle-genetic-pack

Oxford researchers locate high-risk genes for bowel cancer

Research carried out by Oxford University's Wellcome Trust Centre and Cancer Research UK has linked two faulty genes with the development of bowel cancer within families.

Oxford University researchers have located two genetic faults which increase the risk of individuals with a history of bowel cancer in the family developing it themselves.

The research was carried out by the Wellcome Trust Centre for Human Genetics in Oxford and Cancer Research UK, and established a high correlation between bowel cancer development and mutations in two specific genes, POLE and POLD1, which are involved in the DNA repairing processes.

The research found that defects in these genes can cause an accumulation of DNA damage in the body that may contribute to bowel cancer.

The Cancer Research UK-funded project selected twenty people as study subjects, eight of which had previously been diagnosed with bowel cancer whilst the rest had a first-degree relative who developed the illness. After sequencing the genomes of the 20 participants, the scientists found both of the faulty genes in all subjects with bowel cancer or malignant tumours in the bowel.

To further consolidate the result, the research team broadened their inspection base to 4000 people with bowel cancer and a control group of 6700 without the disease. Not a single case of genetic deficiencies in POLE or POLD1 was found in the control group, while the researchers found 12 people with POLE fault and one person with POLD1 fault in the bowel cancer group.

Read more - http://www.cherwell.org/news/uk/2013/01/06/oxford-researchers-locate-highrisk-genes-for-bowel-cancer

World Cancer Day: Are we killing cancer?

Are oncologists right to hail a new era in which cancer is a chronic disease rather than a death sentence?

 

This is not the end, warned Winston Churchill in 1942. “It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.” How apt his words seem this morning, on World Cancer Day, when applied to our long battle against the disease. There is, indeed, new cause for hope. Last week Prof Alan Ashworth, chief executive of the Institute of Cancer Research, launched a £3 million DNA database, the Tumour Profiling Unit, to identify genes responsible for cancers that will become targets for new therapies.

This means patients will have their tumour’s DNA decoded, and then be matched precisely with the right drugs to keep the disease at bay. Prof Ashworth explained that this is a crucial step towards transforming some types of cancer into a manageable disease rather than a death sentence. “We should be aspiring to cure cancer, but for people with advanced disease, it will be a question of managing them better so they survive for much longer, turning cancer into a chronic disease.”

Read more -  http://www.telegraph.co.uk/health/9482981/World-Cancer-Day-Are-we-killing-cancer.html

 

Gene link to higher rates of bowel cancer in men

Cancer Research UK Press Release

Scientists have shown for the first time that one of the sex chromosomes is involved in the development of a cancer that can afflict both genders, according to a Cancer Research UK-funded study in Nature Genetics1. The finding may help explain why men have higher rates of bowel cancer than women.
The international collaboration - led by The Institute of Cancer Research (ICR), the University of Oxford and Edinburgh University – was searching for changes to the DNA code that increase the risk of bowel cancer. For the first time, the scientists identified an alteration on the x-chromosome, one of two chromosomes that determine gender.
The ‘faulty’ region on the x-chromosome is linked to lower levels of a gene called SHROOM2 that controls how cells develop and take shape. Mutations in this gene have previously been linked to cancer.

Read More - http://info.cancerresearchuk.org/news/archive/pressrelease/2012-05-27-bowel-cancer-gene-link