*The family would like to say thank you for the incredibly generous donation 0f 10,000 made by the editorial board of the Journal of Bone and Joint Surgery who wanted to make this gift in Mark's name in acknowledgement of the valuable work he did for the journal over many years. We are also recently informed that the BJJ/EFORT Travelling Fellowship which Mark worked very hard to set up is now to be known as the 'Mark Paterson Travelling Fellowship' - a great honour of which we are very proud.*

Mark Paterson was a dedicated and highly-regarded Consultant Paediatric Orthopaedic surgeon with international renown for his work in Cerebral Palsy. In April 2012, Mark was diagnosed with colorectal carcinoma. Despite swift resection of the original tumour and subsequent treatment, his particular cancer was unresponsive to both mainstream chemotherapy and targeted therapy, and metastatic disease spread quickly to his lungs and spine. Throughout the 18 months of his illness he remained extraordinarily courageous and optimistic that the disease could be controlled to give him some time to continue his work and enjoy his recent hard-earned retirement with family and friends. Sadly, this was not to be and he died on the 15 October 2013, aged 59. With more funding for research into this particularly aggressive form of chemo-resistant cancer, which is being pioneered at UCL, we hope that other sufferers will perhaps have a better chance of survival.

About the research project at UCL:

Recent work from Professor Swanton’s group has demonstrated that the development of aggressive forms of colon cancer is associated with development of multiple copies of the normal chromosomal complement (tetraploidy). Because this results in genetic instability which the cell is able to withstand, the cancer cells are also able to deal with external insults such as DNA damage from anticancer drugs and this may significantly contribute to drug resistance. Thus there may be a unitary mechanism underlying both the aggressiveness of colon cancers and resistance to chemotherapy.

To investigate this in more detail we will examine the features of cellular models of colon cancer to determine the precise mechanisms by which this development of these aggressive characteristics can enable cells to evade effects of therapy.  It will be important to define whether these are features which result in resistance to specific agents or to all therapies. The goal of these studies will be to identify early markers of drug resistance which can then be potentially validated in the clinic and allow more effective therapies to be employed at an early stage.