Australian and New Zealand Researchers Identify Genes Which Help Immune System to Fight Cancer

Today marks the first day of the Australia and New Zealand joint scientific meeting for the Medical Oncology Group of Australia and the Faculty of Radiation Oncology, held in Christchurch NZ.Cancer specialists from Australasia today heard some of the latest ground breaking research in tumour biology. A selection of presentations highlighted some of the giant strides forward that are being made in understanding how tumours metastasise.

Researchers analysed gene signatures from colon cancer cells to see which genes predicted for a bad outcome. Dr Mik Black, Biochemisty Scientist at Otago University NZ, presented the unexpected finding that bowel cancer tumours that grow quickly appeared to have a better outcome than less aggressive tumours.

This is the opposite to what is seen in most tumours, eg breast cancers that have a high proliferation rate have a much worse outcome than those with a low proliferation rate.

He discussed the work by Dr Ahmed Anjomshoaa, shortly to be published in the British Journal of Cancer, which demonstrated that bowel tumours with high proliferation rates were associated with a better outcome independent of whether or not they had chemotherapy. This suggests that chemotherapy may be more effective in slow growing cancer colon tumours.

Dr Black pointed out that gastric cancer had a similar profile and he raised the question as to whether or not tumours with higher proliferation rate stimulate a more aggressive immune response.

He hypothesised that tumours with a high proliferation rate may be sufficiently different from normal colon cells for the immune system to recognise them and attack them thus retarding cancer cell growth.

This was borne out by his finding that the myc gene was overexpressed in tumours with a high proliferation rate and that the myc gene was known to be associated with immune system activation.

Stay posted to Virtual Medical Centre for more breaking news from the conference.