Breaking BRAF is raising money towards Bowel Research UK's See Saw Therapy Research.

Opportunities to fundraise directly for research into the BRAF mutation in Bowel Cancer are RARE. Join us in moving the dial !!!

BRAF-mutated Bowel Cancer is a devastating diagnosis and is sadly affecting more and more younger people, who don't benefit from national screening programmes in the UK. Breaking BRAF is a community of patients and carers who all want to make a difference, to access new treatments quickly and create a better legacy.

This research explores a novel strategy for treating BRAF-mutant bowel cancer by deliberately overstimulating cancer growth pathways to trigger cell death. Using laboratory models and existing drugs, the researchers aim to develop a new treatment approach that could be rapidly translated into clinical practice.

Most current treatments for BRAF-mutated Bowel Cancer aim to switch off the signals that tell cancer cells to grow. This research will test a different idea. Instead of turning these growth signals off, researchers will explore whether turning them on further can kill cancer cells.

One way to think about this is like an electrical circuit: if too much electricity flows through it, the system overloads and fails. Cancer cells that depend strongly on growth signals may already be close to their “overload” limit, therefore pushing the signal even higher could cause too much stress for the cell to survive. Another simple example is a balloon: if you keep blowing air into it, it will eventually pop.

The research team will focus on reusing existing drugs that can increase these growth signals, combining them with standard treatments in carefully timed “see-saw” schedules. They will test this approach in laboratory models that closely match real patient tumours to see if it can kill bowel cancer cells.

The goal of this work is to develop a new treatment strategy for bowel cancer patients with BRAF alterations using existing drugs, so that the findings can help patients as quickly as possible.

This research will be led by Dr Erica Oliveira at the Institute of Cancer Research and is sponsored by Bowel Research UK, for whom we are raising funds to contribute towards the project.

Thank you for helping to bring this exciting research project to life!