Breast cancer
What is breast cancer?
Breast cancer is the most common type of cancer among women in the UK. It is diagnosed in around 41,000 women (and 300 men) each year.
Breasts are made up of between 15 and 20 ‘lobes’, each with many milk-producing ‘lobules’ and a number of ‘ducts’ that connect them to the nipple. Any of these cells can grow and divide in an uncontrolled way and cause breast cancer. If the cancer cells have not spread at all, this is called non-invasive breast cancer. Invasive cancer - when the cells have spread into the surrounding tissue or other parts of the body – can be at different stages depending on how big it is and far it has spread.
The MRC and breast cancer research
Since 2001, the MRC and 18 other major funders of cancer research in the UK have worked in partnership to streamline cancer research. This partnership, called the National Cancer Research Institute (NCRI), helps maintain strategic oversight of UK cancer research, identifies gaps and opportunities and coordinates the funding activities of partner organisations. Programmes funded range from studies into the basic molecular and genetic processes of cancer to clinical trials of new therapies for specific types of the disease. For instance, MRC researchers are carrying out the following breast cancer research:
- Professor Ellen Solomon at King’s College London is trying to gain further understanding of a gene, BRAC1, that is known to be associated with an increased risk of breast cancer, and looking for new genes that might contribute to more common types of the illness that have not yet been linked to genetic risk.
- Professor Paul Harkin of Queen’s University Belfast is also studying BRAC1 to try to identify other genes in the same pathway that may also be involved in susceptibility to the disease.
- Professor John Yarnold is tracking almost 4,500 breast cancer patients who were treated in 2002 with radiotherapy, to investigate the effects of different radiotherapy schedules and doses.
- Dr Sue Moss of the Institute for Cancer Research is following 160,000 women for two decades to find out whether starting mammogram screening at age 40 instead of age 50 reduces deaths from breast cancer.