The past 10 years have witnessed a doubling of colorectal cancers (CRC) in people under 50 years of age – from 5% to 10% of all cases. Just in the US, between 2008 and 2015, this increase was over 60%!

When we hear about someone having been diagnosed with “stage IV” cancer, most of us know this is very bad news. It is the most advanced overall cancer stage.

Classifying – or staging – a cancer is paramount to determining the cancer’s prognosis (its likely evolution) and to choose the most appropriate treatment. A misclassified cancer can lead to wrong treatment options, including undertreatment or overtreatment.

Consider CT scans and PET scans. In oncologic radiology, these are two very popular diagnostic tools, meant for imaging the tissues inside the body and detect cancer. 

A CT-scan (CT for computerized tomography) gives detailed, static, images of the body’s internal organs and tissues. This is enough to see a rough image of a tumor, but may not always allow doctors to distinguish the exact frontier between benign and malignant tissues. 

Interview with Marta Carriço, nutritionist at the Champalimaud Foundation.

Marta Carriço is a nutritionist in the Risk Assessment Programme team (Programa de Oncorrisco) at the Champalimaud Clinical Centre. In this interview, she explains what is known – and not known – about the impact of eating habits on the prevention of oncological disease, strongly favouring the Mediterranean diet.

In the case of cancer (as in other diseases) any research study involving human volunteers that is intended to acquire medical knowledge about a potential new drug, vaccine or biological substance against a specific type of cancer – in which these are administered to a group of participants – is called a clinical trial.

A report, published last week (16 November) in The Lancet Oncology by an expert commission, under the title Key messages from European Groundshot – addressing Europe’s cancer research challenges: a Lancet Oncology Commission, analyses the current state of cancer research in Europe, identifies geographical and gender gaps (among others), and issues recommendations to rethink the priorities of European cancer research.

Fátima Cardoso, director of the Breast Unit at the Champalimaud Clinical Center/Champalimaud Foundation, is among the co-authors of the new report.

Cancers can be detected through the presence, in the tumours or bodily fluids, of so-called molecular biomarkers – in other words, of biological molecules (proteins, genes, etc.) found in blood or tissues that are a sign that a person has cancer. One well-known cancer biomarker is the PSA protein, whose rapid rise in the blood may indicate the presence of prostate cancer. 

All cancers are genetic in nature, in the sense that they all arise from genetic mutations inside cells. But the origin of those mutations can vary: they can be due to environmental factors (for example exposure to carcinogenic substances such as tobacco smoke or asbestos particles), but also to spurious DNA replication errors during the cellular division of any cell type in the body. Such random, unpredictable DNA errors account for nearly two-thirds of the mutations responsible for cancer.

Helena Gouveia, oncologist at the Breast Unit of the Champalimaud Foundation (CF) tells us about two important examples of collaborative endeavours between this Unit and CF’s research labs. Scientists and clinicians join efforts to do translational research/medicine – that is, to take recent scientific advances “to the patients’ bedside” as safely, quickly and efficiently as possible.

In this short video, Marcio Debiasi, oncologist at the Breast Unit of the Champalimaud Foundation, presents a study dubbed KeyPARTNER, which is being carried out in this Unit with support from industrial funders. The study’s aim is to optimize the use of chemotherapy together with immunotherapy for the treatment of so-called “triple negative” breast cancers, which are considered to be the most aggressive breast tumours.