• Question: Do you do any other cancer reaserch?

    Asked by ollysteen1 to Kat on 18 Mar 2013.
    • Photo: Kathryn McMahon

      Kathryn McMahon answered on 18 Mar 2013:


      Hi Ollysteen1. I do some work on the cancer cells themselves, as well as the blood vessels around them. We’re really interested in things called biomarkers. These are genes that some particular cancers express and other don’t. The reason we’re interested in them is because we want to use them to help us identify different types of cancers. For example, breast cancer is not just one disease, its several. Each of these type of breast cancer will need different treatment – some will need very aggressive treatment (e.g. where the breast is removed) that will make the patient quite ill, some will not. What the doctor doesn’t want to do is give the very aggressive treatment to the patient who doesn’t need it, as you don’t want to make them really ill or remove their breast if they don’t need it. So we’re trying to help doctors identify the patients with the more aggressive cancers using biomarkers. To do this, we take thin slices of hundreds of tumours and stain them to look at different genes and see which ones are expressed where. You can actually have a look at one of my slides here (although this is brain, rather than breast):
      http://slides.virtualpathology.leeds.ac.uk/Research_5/LIMM/Kat_McMahon/2012_12_06/198016.svs/view.apml?

      Each round circle is a tiny slice of a different brain tumour. You can zoom in using the scale bar on the left. The brown blobs are tumour cells that have turned on the gene I’m looking at.

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