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WORLD CLASS BASIC, TRANSLATIONAL AND CLINICAL RESEARCH

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One step closer for predictive ‘liquid biopsy’ in cancer patients

16 August 2015

Researchers in the Clinical and Experimental Pharmacology group, led by Professor Caroline Dive, have developed a robust blood test to identify key molecules that help tumour cells produce energy, thereby supporting cancer growth. The new method could allow doctors to better predict which patients will benefit from new therapies that target these molecules to stop cancer growth.  Unlike normal cells, cancer cells preferentially use glycolysis to produce energy, a process that produces lactate as a by-product. Molecules known as monocarboxylate transporters (MCTs) help move lactate out of cells, and drugs that target MCTs have been shown to stop tumour growth. One, termed AZD3965, has been effective in the lab and is now being evaluated in clinical trials in patients.

In order to tailor treatment to the patient, it is important to understand why some patients respond differently to the drug, and how this relates to the amount of two different MCTs – MCT1 and MCT4 – expressed in their tumour. Professor Dive and her team are particularly interested in exploring cancer cells that are found circulating in a patient’s blood and have now developed and tested a new method to detect these two molecules in circulating tumour cells (CTCs). CTCs are cancer cells that have broken free from the patient’s primary tumour and travel around the body in the blood stream. They have the potential to enable the molecular properties of an individual’s cancer to be studied without the need for an invasive biopsy procedure.

The group used two different cell lines with known amounts of MCT1 and MCT4 to confirm that they were able to reliably detect these two molecules. They then showed that their method could be applied to blood samples from lung cancer patients and can identify CTCs containing these MCTs.