Hi All,

 

Many thanks for visiting my sponsorship page for the Bristol half marathon. I have never attempted such a distance before, having only ran 10k’s previously, so it will be quite a personal challenge to double this. I am supporting two causes, cancer research UK and Wateraid. Cancer is one of the most terrible diseases affecting the developed world, therefore money for research is vital, however additionally I felt it was important to donate to a 3 world development project, to help those far less fortunate than ourselves and suffering with preventable illnesses through no fault of their own.

 

Both charities are very close to my heart so please be generous. Giftaid doesn’t allow a 50/50 split, hence the two separate links below, if you have the time please split your donation equally between the two (even if it is just a pound or so each, know it’s a bit of a hassle) as both very deserving causes. Equally if you have a very strong preference for one over the other then please go with that.

Sincere thanks for your donation

 

Sarah

 

One day Darren will find a cure for cancer and save the world of various other ailments... but until that day donations to provide money for people who have more of a clue to carry out important research will be much appreciated!

Blurb on the excellent work of scientists at cancer research uk...

We are on the way to beating cancer, and there is good progress being made. Half of all people diagnosed with cancer today will survive for more than five years – a significant increase compared to just a few decades ago. And ten-year survival rates have doubled since the 70s.

Over the past century, our researchers have made consistent progress in the fight against cancer.  From studies of the intricate workings of molecules within cells to the results of large-scale clinical trials of treatments, every result helps to deepen our understanding of cancer, and highlight new ways to prevent, diagnose and treat it.

An example study

CHEK2 – a new breast cancer gene

This month’s ‘high-impact’ paper, was published in May 2002. Entitled “Low-penetrance susceptibility to breast cancer due to CHEK2*1100delC in noncarriers of BRCA1 or BRCA2 mutations” – it’s a great example of genetic research, showing how the investigation of a single family’s genes led to the identification of a gene fault that may be responsible for a significant minority of inherited breast cancers.

Who did the research?

The work was carried out by an international team of scientists, including Professor Doug Easton and his colleagues at the Cancer Research UK Genetic Epidemiology Group at the University of Cambridge, and the results were published in the journal Nature Genetics. The work was funded by Cancer Research UK, the Dutch Cancer Society, and several other European cancer research organisations

Background

Researchers carried out analysis of a family where several members had been diagnosed with breast cancer at a relatively early age. Such a ‘clustering’ of cancer cases points the finger at cancer risk being inherited in this family.

The idea of inherited cancer risk was certainly nothing new in 2002. Indeed, the clustering of breast cancer within families was noted even in Roman times, and documented more than 100 years ago by the French surgeon Pierre Broca. Modern science has now pinpointed the ‘gene’ as the unit of inheritance, and shown that faults in genes can be passed down from parents to their children, sometimes increasing their risk of disease.

The family in this study were chosen for investigation because it was already known that they did not possess faults in BRCA1 or BRCA2, two previously identified ‘high-risk’ breast cancer genes. Inheriting a faulty version of one of these genes increases a person’s risk of developing breast cancer. But they are rare in the population and only cause 2-5 per cent of all breast cancer cases.

Because members of the family did not have faulty BRCA genes yet still seemed to have increased rate of breast cancer, the researchers hoped to pinpoint other gene mutations that might account for their susceptibility to breast cancer. And, importantly, they wanted to work out whether any such faults might account for breast cancer in the wider population.

What did they do?

Using well-established laboratory techniques like DNA sequencing together with some hard-core statistical analysis, the researchers studied samples of genetic material taken from family members with and without the disease to try to identify genetic regions that could be linked to breast cancer. Their results pointed them in the direction of a particular region on chromosome 22 that seemed to be linked to the cancer in this family.

Because of earlier work, the team already knew that a gene called CHEK2 is found in this region. This was encouraging, as other researchers had also found that the protein encoded by CHEK2 is involved in stopping cells from dividing when DNA is damaged – an important mechanism used by the body to stop damaged cells from multiplying and potentially causing cancer.

It was therefore reasonable to suggest that mutations in CHEK2 could be linked with breast cancer.

The next step was to figure out whether CHEK2 was damaged in this family, and if so, whether this damage to CHEK2 might be the reason the family developed more cancers.

Gene faults – or mutations – can occur when a ‘typo’ occurs in the normal sequence of building blocks that a gene is made of.

Mutations, like typos, can have varying effects. Sometimes they go virtually unnoticed – but other mutations can have a dramatic impact on how the cell functions. To use our analogy, a typo that changed “onion” to “oniun” wouldn’t have much of an effect on a recipe for soup, but changing “tomato” to “potato” certainly would.

Others researchers had identified a specific fault which was known to stop the CHEK2 protein working properly. Maybe, thought the scientists, this known fault could be causing the cancers?

So, to test their idea, the researchers decided to give the whole family a genetic test to see if any of them were carrying this mutation.

What did they find?

Of the 17 people who had breast cancer in this family, 7 people had the CHEK2 mutation – more than you’d expect by chance. Clearly, CHEK2 was at least partly to blame for this family’s tragic history of cancer.

But did this apply to just this family? Or was this affecting other people too? The scientists needed more evidence to say for sure that faulty CHEK2 played a role in breast cancer in the general population.

And this is where the study really came into its own. Now that they had a hunch that CHEK2 mutation was possibly causing the cancers in this family, the scientists tested other, much larger numbers of people from the UK, the Netherlands, North America and Germany for the presence of the CHEK2 mutation.

They classified all these people into different groups, including:

• A healthy, ‘control’ group – that is, people who had not been diagnosed with cancer.
• People with inherited breast cancer, from families without faults in their BRCA genes (the ‘BRCA-negative’ group, like the original family studied).
• People with breast cancer who had not been selected based on their family history (called the ‘population-based group’). This was to get a snapshot of how many people with breast cancer in general, irrespective of family history, carry the CHEK2 fault.

By comparing how many people in each group had the CHEK2 mutation, the scientists reached some interesting conclusions.

Firstly, and importantly, around 5 of every 100 people from the BRCA-negative group carried the CHEK2 mutation, but only about 1 in every 100 people in the ‘no breast cancer’ control group had it. This was evidence that CHEK2 mutations increase breast cancer risk at least in certain people.

However, equally important, there was only a tiny difference in how many people had the CHEK2 mutation in the population-based breast cancer group versus the control group. This means that although the CHEK2 mutation increases breast cancer risk, it only increases it by a relatively small amount.