A new tool to track cancer and unlock its secrets

Our researchers in London have made a new discovery that could be an important first step towards new cancer cures. Their breakthrough reveals new insights into how pancreatic cancer spreads, using a cutting-edge ‘chemical probe’ that can track specific molecules in cancer cells.

We would like to thank all the Curestarters for supporting this work which brings us a step forward in understanding cancer mechanisms and finding new ways to overcome them.

Professor Edward Tate Imperial College London, United Kingdom

To find new ways to tackle cancer, including how to better prevent, diagnose, and treat it, we need to uncover the secrets of how cancer works.

For our researchers, this often means focusing their efforts on a specific feature of the biology of cancer, such as a single type of protein and how it is involved in cancer. That’s just what Professor Edward Tate, whose research you helped fund, focused on when he and his team made this important discovery about how cancer spreads.

Professor Tate is a Chemical Biologist at Imperial College London, so he’s an expert in the complex chemical reactions that happen in the human body. His search for new knowledge had already revealed that a specific protein called KLK6 is involved somehow in pancreatic cancer, but he wanted to know exactly what this protein was doing – he’d need to track it!

Professor Tate’s innovative work to track KLK6 has resulted in a brand new tool, a ‘chemical probe’, that lets the researchers specifically track the protein in models of cancer to see what it is doing. The probe proved that they were right to study KLK6. They tracked this protein in pancreatic cancer cells, and discovered that it is involved in cell migration, or how cells move around the body – that means it could be important for how cancer cells spread to other organs (metastasis).

How could this discovery help cancer patients?

Professor Tate believes similar probes to track other important proteins like KLK6 could one day be used to diagnose cancer in patients. It could even help make surgery to remove tumours more successful, if the tumour has high levels of a protein that can be tracked with the probe – they could use it to clearly see the boundary where healthy cells are replaced by cancer cells.

In the near future, Professor Tate hopes to uncover more secrets about cancer by creating other probes to track what proteins like KLK6 are doing. He plans to use this discovery to create a wide range of tools to study different types of cancer. He also plans to share his findings with other researchers, so they can build on his discovery about KLK6.

This is an important first step in the research journey. Achieving the next step, and the one after that, often means sharing that new knowledge with others. Like a snowball rolling down a hill, a new discovery about cancer can be built upon over time and result in something great.