Hear the latest development in identifying pre-cancer cells from friend of the Red Trouser Day charity Dr. Irene Chong. We are proud to help fund her and her talented teams pioneering research work at the Royal Marsden.
” My area of research aims to prevent cancer from developing in the first place by understanding what causes cancer to grow.
I’m Irene Chong. I’m head of radiotherapy at the Royal Marsden Hospital and I’m a clinical oncologist treating GI malignancies. I’ve treated cancer patients for almost two decades and it is important to identify areas of unmet clinical need. It’s also incredibly difficult to watch our patients go through treatment at times because it can be intense with associated side effects.
The reason why I am researching what I do is a to prevent cancer in the first place, and secondly to try and make our treatments as precise as possible so that we can alleviate their suffering. There are some cancers which originate from abnormal cells and what I’ve been doing in the laboratory is to use next generation sequencing across all of the genome to identify the genetic mutations that are present in the pre-cancer cells, and compare that with the cancer cells.
And what we’ve noted is that in some tumours, the pre-cancer cells are very similar to those in the cancer cells, which then makes us then take a step back in order to try and develop treatments to prevent cancer such as vaccines, which we’re currently working on. And this has not only a local but national and global potential in terms of cancer prevention.”
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